EVERY summer when a football tournament comes around the armchair Tartan Army set their watches for the first mention of 1966. It is as predictable as clockwork and comes with the self-assured reasoning that everyone, irrespective of their national background shares the same overwhelming English history. It is the very essence of entitlement.

I have played “1996 Bingo” to the point of boredom so this year I am trying to guess the first reactionary dullard to say, “politics and sport should never mix”. It is a cliche of such resounding emptiness that you would think it might have died away with over-use but with each new tournament it returns to the big stage, ever more vacuous.

Politics and sport not only mix they are profoundly interrelated and anyone who thinks they can separate them is probably an over-remunerated co-commentator, who thinks that the 4-4-2 system is more important than the forces of history.

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Although Euro 2020 has been delayed by a year due to Covid it has got off to a great start, politics are already in the air. Ukraine, who feature in Group C alongside Austria, Netherlands and North Macedonia have launched their tournament shirt which contains an abstract design based on a map of Ukraine, incorporating Crimea which Russia annexed in 2014. It is the ultimate “get-it-up-you” to Putin and his regime. Russia find themselves in a fearsomely difficult group with ­Belgium, Denmark, and Finland. There will be mass celebration in Kiev if the detested Russians are home before the postcards.

Nor is it entirely clear how Uefa will react to the Ukraine shirt. They are ­generally cautious of politics and tend to ban or punish anything that is deemed controversial. That is not to say Uefa is an apolitical organisation, quite the ­contrary, they are deeply embedded in corporate capitalism and have secured sponsorship for Volkswagen, FedEx and Gazprom the Russian state-owned multi-national energy corporation. Another fascinating sub-plot is whether Gazprom will exert sponsor’s pressure to challenge Ukraine’s shirt on behalf of Putin.

England striker Marcus Rashford and his high-profile campaigns against childhood poverty are already buzzing around the tournament. Rashford has been ­criticised by England’s social media warriors for challenging the government and raising millions to feed underprivileged children. He is frequently told in a condescending way to “stick to football” and his tense relationship with the current Tory Government may erupt again. Journalists will come armed to post-match press conferences looking for a news story and I hope Rashford delivers.

Rashford also features in a wider football controversy, the act of taking the knee, the now divisive pre-match ritual on behalf of racial justice. In pre-tournament warm up games, some England fans jeered their players taking the knee, provoking England boss Gareth ­Southgate into writing an open letter in which he defended his players rights to ­demonstrate against racism. It was a ­powerful statement which cast ­Southgate in a ­positive light despite his baffling ­inability to ­differentiate ­between England and ­Britain and his gushingly old-fashioned love of royalty and street bunting. At times it felt like a letter written by a dowager form Kent in the 1950s rather than a modern-day football manager.

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It is evident from the sour reaction of some England fans that the Black Lives Matter movement has got under their skin, and they have been clucking like rudderless critics describing the movement as simultaneously Marxist and Anarchist. Putting aside those crude generalisations there is a huge historical misunderstanding around these protests.

First, the act of taking the knee emerged out of Christian church communities in the civil rights era and pre-dates Black Lives Matter by more than 50 years. Rashford’s mum wasn’t even born when the idea took hold in the Southern States of America. More up to date, it was the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick who took the knee during the national anthem in NFL games in season 2016, that added new momentum. He had seen a photograph of Dr Martin Luther King taking the knee and thought it was a respectful gesture of defiance. It was Donald Trump, through his ugly demonising of Kaepernick, that turned a quiet and pacifist protest into an ugly and red-hot controversy. Many have since imbibed Trump’s animus not the spirit of Kaepernick’s silent protest.

THE Scotland squad have already taken a decision to take the knee in solidarity with their England counterparts for the sides’ match at Wembley but not for matches played at Hampden. It has not been universally popular, but the decision is to “take a stand” alongside Scotland’s black striker Che Adams, who was born and raised in Leicestershire but qualifies for Scotland through his maternal grandmother. It may have come from the SFA or from a team meeting but “the stand” has none of the dramatic symbolism of taking the knee.

Over the next few weeks, the serially dense will be out and about making the naïve case for disaggregating politics and sport. It is a flawed argument with next to no moral authority. Football reflects a sense of nationhood and community, it is funded by corporate capital and global media, and it is riven with old enmities sometimes born out of war and annexation, those are all components of what we widely consider to be politics.

Rather than restrict politics on the field of play, I relish acts that tell me more about the nations Scotland may face.

Who can forget the match between Serbia and Switzerland in the 2018 World Cup Finals? There was nothing much to grab the neutral observer until an unsuspected piece of political theatre unfolded. Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri both scored for Switzerland who eventually beat Serbia 2-1. The two goalscorers were from an ethnic Albanian background and had agreed before kick-off that they would celebrate with a double-eagle celebration, forming their hands into the eagle’s wings borrowed from the livery of the Albanian flag. Serbian fans behind the goal, many of them wearing shirts honouring the infamous Serbian war criminals, Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic had already stoked the embers of ethnic war.

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After the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbia had responded to separatist pressure from Kosovo by launching a brutal crackdown on the territory’s Albanian population. The ­father of one of Xhaka had spent three and a half years as a political prisoner in ­Yugoslavia, while Shaqiri was born in ­Yugoslavia ­before emigrating to ­Switzerland as a child refugee. Serbian fans fumed in the aftermath asking a question that goes to the heart of ethnic identity – if ­Shaqiri cared so much about the Albanian ­Kosovars why did he chose to play for Switzerland and not Albania?

What for most seemed like a so-what game suddenly ignited giving context to a relatively new dynamic in international football, refugees and asylum seekers qualifying for the nation that had given them haven. Had the politics been removed it would be entirely unmemorable.

We live in an era of globalisation where immigration and the movement of labour shapes societies. Shaqiri and Scotland’s Adams elected to represent nations on a global stage after Uefa extended the rights of players to include their birth line and their place of residency and schooling.

To take politics out of football would be a denial of history and would lessen the epic importance of the greatest game on earth.