Prof. Michael Silk
Professor Michael Silk, Director of the Sport & Physical Activity Research Centre, Bournemouth University. Professor Silk’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the various relationships between sport & physical activity (physical culture), mediated spectacles, inequality and urban spaces.
Email: msilk@bournemouth.ac.uk
Dr. Keith Parry
Dr Keith Parry, Principal Academic, Bournemouth University. Dr Parry’s research is primarily focused on identity, sport and in/exclusion and how both traditional and newer, online media formats are used to present and discuss these subjects.
Within this commentary, we focus on the official England Men’s 2026 World Cup Squad ‘reveal’, Come Together: a product of a confluence of interrelated factors indicative of the economic forces and conjoined cultural politics of the contemporary moment. Our interest lies in explicating how a spectacularized cultural product of national recollection and embodiments of ‘Englishness’ reflects and reproduces social hierarchies, offering constructions of the character, culture and the historical trajectory of people; constructions that by their very nature are acts of inclusion and exclusion.
Come Together: The ‘reveal’
Produced by the Dirty Vanilla creative Agency, Come Together opens with a black and white clip of a young John Lennon. A reporter asks Lennon if he believes that The Beatles are ‘very English?’ Lennon replies, with a hint of irony, his Liverpudlian accent replaced with the ‘Queen’s English’, “I think we’re jolly English actually.” Scored by the Beatles Hit, ‘Come Together’, the clip cuts to a polychrome cacophony of an England three-lions crest adorning a stylised version of an England training shirt. The scene unfolds—in slow motion—with an unnamed black male, running down Jamaica Avenue in New York City, dreadlocks flying in the air as he traverses the cityscape with names of squad members appearing in various guises (e.g. on a taxi, on shop signage, and the back of a denim jacket). Interspersed with clips of screaming Beatle fans (holding signs with the names of England squad members) the scene cuts to a Beatles inspired poster adorned with images of the defensive ‘fab-four’: Ezri Konza, Nico O’Reilly, Marc Guehi and Reece James. Laced with historic Beatles references (psychedelic Yellow Submarine animation, Abbey Road) and a scene in a Texan inspired line-dancing bar (with Declan Rice imprinted on a cowboy boot, and Morgan Rogers on the back pocket of a pair of denim shorts), the ‘reveal’ nods to the cultural impact the Beatles had on the United States in the 1960s, with the presumption being that this England squad can do the same. A photobooth animation then reveals the images of Eberechi Eze, Noni Madueke, Kobbie Mainoo and Bukayo Saka (the midfield ‘fab four’). The protagonist (the runner) is joined by native New Yorkers (the most prominent were two black women, one wearing a remodelled Mets Baseball top adorned with ENGLAND) as various attacking players names were revealed on t-shirts (Kane), umbrellas (Toney and Watkins) or hand-held signs (Gordon and Rashford). The ‘reveal’ ended with a shot imitating Theatre inspired signage, announcing the squad as ‘live and in person’ (a detached signifier relating to The Beatles 1964 appearance at the Paramount Theatre).
A utopian abstraction of nation
Much like the iconic Three Lions anthem, Come Together collapses distinct temporal moments and disrupts the linear chronology of the past. However, unlike Three Lions which depicts both a past and present England as completely homogenous in its whiteness, Come Together depicts a multi-racial England squad—framed by the creative mobilisation of a black aesthetic manifest in the New York city streetscape (contrasted perhaps with the apparent whiteness of country music and line dancing) and the key protagonist—with the most prominent bodies (the defensive and midfield ‘fab-fours’) being exclusively black or mixed-race. Whiteness, however, is signified through an embodied absence of sorts, reduced to text on Cowboy boots, t-shirts, shop fronts and signage. This can, in part, be read as a progressive racial narrative, a utopian abstraction of the nation in an imagined community of shared allegiance. However, Come Together is released at a conjunctural moment in England of distinct racial tension and fear within communities and on the bodies of non-white citizens: the nothingness of ‘Englishness’; the assurgency of right-wing political parties and groups; the politics of (il)legal migration; the ongoing attacks of mosques, synagogues and other places of worship; ‘Islamophobia’; urban segregation; and, non-white asylum seekers and care workers being dragged from homes, hotels and workplaces due to the colour of their skin.
It is in this context in which we read Come Together critically. Come Together may well appear as a positive and progressive artifact subverting the status quo and providing an opportunity to recover greatness in the imagination—literally an invitation come together as a nation. However, and in so doing, it effaces the harsh realities witnessed in the everyday interactions of a diverse population, screens out confrontation, and ignores structural inequalities, competing discourses, histories and pasts. In this sense, Come Together performs a pride politics: a mythic multicultural ‘jolly’ Englishness in which legitimatemulticultural racialised subjects are not only ‘let in’, but redefined as ‘integral’ to speak (and play) for the nation—exemplary embodiments of multicultural England, the perfect rejoinder to assertions of ethnic essentialism, racism and intolerance. Critically however, inclusion is contingent on toeing the line(s) as ‘appropriate’ national subjects: not least through being concretely grounded within a pre-told ‘common’ narrative: the simplicity and ‘greatness’ of 1960’s English popular culture. Come Together thus renders racism dead whilst echoes of colonial racism are at play in the limit points of multiculturalism that filter and order immigration, identities and minorities in England (Back et al. 2012). And of course, contingent multi-racial inclusion will err perilously close to these ‘limit points’, likely ‘revealed’ if one of the fab-four were to miss a penalty.
