Wednesday evening. It’s time to go to the pub! My girlfriend is unsure. Why? She’s heavily pregnant. She finds the pub tiresome—she finds it dispiriting, to sit marooned with a Guinness 0.0 while everyone chats rubbish and tosses her only the most boring questions like, “How are you feeling?”
Fair enough, I say, fair critique—but we must. It’s the semifinals. It’s England versus our good pals Argentina. We must! But England are going to lose, she says. They are not going to lose, I say. They are going to win. Even if they do win, she says, they’ll just lose in the final. They’re not going to lose in the final, I say, they’re going to win. It’s coming home.
The only thing that’s coming home, she says, is us, after the pub, with you in a horrible mood because you’ve indulged in some light nationalism followed, once England has lost, by some long rants about this stupid, fascist, shithole island and its completely irredeemable football team. That’s not true, I say, that is literally impossible, because we are going to win this game, and then the next game, and therefore the whole World Cup.
Right, she says. You go. I might join you for the second half.
The country has recently sweltered through rolling heatwaves, but a few days ago the temperatures dipped and now, suddenly, we have been granted a summer evening of almost perfect balminess. On the way to the pub, I marvel at how quickly things can change. For a long time, years and years, England’s vibes have been pretty bad, but now, thanks to us winning the World Cup, they’re going to be pretty good—forever. Alexander Pope’s famous quip comes to mind: “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” What a load of bollocks! More like blessed is he who expects everything, because then it will definitely happen and when it does it’ll be super awesome.
The Winchester, on Archway Road, is, of course, packed when I arrive. Fifteen minutes until kickoff. Standing room only. I spot my brother in the throng around the bar. He signals that he’ll get me a drink. On my phone, I receive a news alert: The Labour Party has concluded nominations for its new leader. No time for that now.
Of the party’s 403 MPs, Andy Burnham, the former Mayor of Manchester, has secured the support of 379. On Friday, he will replace Keir Starmer as leader, and on Monday he will become prime minister, our seventh in ten years.
No time for that now! The TVs are doing stuff. There are celebrities in the crowd! Mick Jagger, the sulky old puma. Posh and David Spice. That guy from One Direction. Why would all these English celebrities be watching the match if England weren’t going to win? It doesn’t make any sense! I glance at my brother, but he doesn’t seem to be any closer to the bar. Now the anthems. Now the infantilizing kickoff countdown. My brother looks not an inch closer to getting us both a drink. Now the whistle, now a mid-tier cheer through the pub, scattered clapping, and it’s begun, the semifinal grudge match against Argentina, which we are going to win.
What follows is the maybe least pleasant first half of football I’ve seen all tournament. There’s a nervy energy to both teams and a shoving match breaks out almost immediately. The fouls come in thick: five in the first ten minutes. Neither side looks particularly interested in trying to score goals. The first attempt comes from England in the thirty-third minute: John Stones heads wide a Declan Rice free kick. The pub rises and then deflates into polite clapping. Soon after, Argentina break and Messi is fouled; his subsequent shot is blocked, but Enzo Fernández picks up the ball and boots it toward goal. A collective intake of breath—but it’s too high. Bellingham makes a spirited infield run, but it comes to nothing. Three minutes of additional time. Nothing happens. The halftime whistle. 0–0. Nineteen fouls total. The patrons of the Winchester turn away from the screens and begin to mill about in bored chatter.
Finally, my brother makes it back from the bar. He hands me a pint and shakes his head in disbelief. And he’s made a friend, his queue-mate of the past forty-five-ish minutes. The three of us touch glasses. I ask this man his name, but he answers a different question. Nil-nil, I’ll take it, he says. Messi is nowhere and Bellingham hasn’t been sent off. I’ll take it. We’re a second-half team.
We better be, my brother says.
I no longer know it but God, I hope so.
Hope, that American vice, has recently been spotted vacationing this side of the Atlantic. After England beat Norway in the quarterfinals, people began to wonder. We knew we were a jammy side, at times world-class but not consistently world-class. Still, nevertheless, maybe . . . if we had just enough jam? If we just hoped hard enough? The English, being the English, couldn’t quite bring themselves to use the h-word, but we did begin to type out our daydreams. Wouldn’t it be nice? Can you imagine?
Politics—ever-eventful, ever-dominant, even alongside the World Cup—has indulged no such restraint. Hope is here now, and its sudden, brutish appearance in the rhetoric has illuminated its previous absence.
How quickly things change. Last month, the Labour MP Josh Simons, a key architect of the Labour Together faction that brought Sir Keir Starmer and his allies to power, stepped down from his Makerfield constituency (in the northwest, between Manchester and Liverpool), in order to trigger a by-election—and the chance for Andy Burnham to win a seat in parliament. As a sitting MP, Burnham could challenge Starmer for the leadership of the floundering Labour party and, by extension, the country.
Nigel Farage’s right-populist Reform UK has led the incumbents in the polls for over a year. Starmer’s personal approval ratings have been underwater for longer. So unpopular has been the government that there was some anxiety about whether Burnham, running under the Labour rosette, could even pull off the Makerfield win. But he did, declaring in his victory speech that his new constituents had “voted for hope.” The ascendant PM went on, vowing to “[bring] back something we’ve lost: Hope. Hope for the future.” Ten days later, on June 29, when he formally launched his leadership bid at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, his speech contained a further eight instances of the word: “possibility and hope flowing around the country;” “I hope people can begin to feel the excitement;” “that ability to hope;” “a sense of hope;” “people need hope;” “imagine good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart.” If you’re counting, he said that last one twice.
Do people need hope? Well, aside from football there hasn’t been a lot of it going around, so yes, goddamn yes, we need it—but only if it is hope, and not just some rousing blather. In Terry Eagleton’s Hope Without Optimism, the virtue is distinct from mere optimism: Hope is an active, reasoned commitment to the open possibilities of the future, “the enemy of idle utopianism as well as of despair.” Optimism, by contrast, is “not a disposition one attains through deep reflection or disciplined study,” just a “primordial stance towards the world” that readily collapses into its “corrupt corollary,” self-delusion. Hope is creative—it seeks. Optimism is bovine—it assumes.
It can, however, be difficult to distinguish between the two, especially as optimism is often sold as hope. In a political context, the paradigmatic example is, of course, Shephard Fairey’s Obama poster, which is as famous as political graphic design gets (less well known, perhaps, is that the poster’s iconic HOPE was a late sub for the word “progress,” which the Obama campaign worried might have less broad of an appeal). Now, the image is practically the logo of the disappointment industrial complex: both fuzzily nostalgic and ironically curdled, the hope that turned out to be mere optimism and vibes, end-of-year reading lists and drone strikes, aggressive deportations and Netflix deals.
Football is less prone to this mislabelling of goods, in part because its hopes come packaged in falsifiable units. Politics tends to promise a better future while trying to avoid firm commitments and specificities. Any given football future is, when it comes to the actual games, discrete. England will beat Argentina 8–0. England will win the World Cup. Football can and will falsify your face off. Optimism (and its twin, pessimism) are predictions in disguise, whereas hope rests in the ability to imagine potentials—it is descriptive, and makes no claims to prophecy.
If you really were counting a few paragraphs back, you will have noted that even with the repeat phrase, I only mentioned seven instances of “hope” in Burnham’s speech. The eighth was more interesting: “What hope can we have that it will be different this time?” he said. “This is the question I would be asking as a voter right now.” Well, I’m sure it will be different. Every one of our prime ministers since 2016 has been different. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, and now Burnham, seven political dwarves of easy delineation: Chancey, Wheaty, Sleazy, Briefy, Richy, Painful, and now, Manc. That he will be different is in no doubt; that he will be good is in plenty. Hope, so bluntly invoked, sits a little goofily in the British psyche. Burnham’s question, paradoxically, doesn’t give me much—but at least it isn’t framed as a promise.
And yet, when politics are as erratic as they have been in the UK this past decade, faith in the entire system erodes easily, no matter how well-meaning its players. It also becomes easier to cynically conceptualize the system away from the specificity of personage or policy, to see its more basal attributes. Elections are to some extent always a choice between stick and twist: stay the course or change tack. The Tories’ punitive imposition of austerity since the 2008 financial crash turbocharged a process of decline that has been baked into the British state since at least the 1960s. In 2016, people were miserable, and when Brexit was put to a referendum they voted twist. Every single vote since has also been for twist, even if it has often meant the same party maintaining power. Success at the ballot box has gone to whoever appeared least like the previous guy or gal.
And yet the decline continues. If hope can be thought of as an openness and a will towards the full potency of the future, its true opposite is the inability to imagine any future at all. Britain’s imperial and economic decline began well before the neoliberal reforms at the root of the post-Thatcherite British disease, but fifty years of the same diminishing returns can result, unsurprisingly, in apathy, detachment, and a numbness towards the world, the scope of which is sometimes only apparent during fleeting moments of relief.
Wednesday evening in the pub. England versus Argentina. The second half begins and suddenly everyone at the Winchester develops a kind of hypersensitivity toward the match. For a people so often over-identified with clinically depressed catchphrases like “Keep Calm and Carry On” (which, incidentally, was rarely used in official wartime propaganda), their alertness at times like this is a strange phenomenon.
On the pitch, both sides are more purposeful. There’s life in this game and my girlfriend appears suddenly, at my side. Hooray! Would she like a Guinness 0.0? No! Who could blame her!
And then it happens. A long pass by Kane is first intercepted by Argentina’s Tagliafico but it’s an awkward overhead kick and the ball is knocked on by Declan Rice to Morgan Rogers, who sends a lovely, low cross at forty-five degrees toward goal; Anthony Gordon rushes in, his knee is up and his foot is there and the ball crashes past the keeper.
The Winchester erupts. Pounding tables, pumping fists, wild cheering. Can you imagine? Moments later, there is a cheer almost as loud when Djed Spence lays an incredible tackle on Giuliano Simeone, denying him a chance for an equalizer. For at least four super awesome minutes, England seem ascendant, unstoppable. Messi rubs his face. The Argentinian fans glower in the stands. Then, for the next twenty-three minutes, England make do with 12 percent possession. They fall back, against a relentless Argentina who have suddenly decided to play. England successfully hold out against the assault until the eighty-fifth minute, when Fernández takes a Messi corner and zips it tidily into the far side of the net. In the second minute of stoppage time, Lautaro Martinez’s header puts Argentina ahead. And that’s that.
Well, my girlfriend says, as the crowd shuffles out, what did you expect? I expected to win, I say, even though now, I’m not sure I ever did. Practically my whole life I have watched England collapse back, park the bus on flimsy leads, refuse to press, refuse to give it a go. And then, subsequently, lose.
On the pitch, two Argentinian players are parading a fan-made banner that reads LAS MALVINAS SON ARGENTINAS. A very drunk man who has been shouting “Argie bastards” all match to the discomfort of those around him says it again, louder, this time to murmurs of agreement.
Oh well, my girlfriend says. My girlfriend is Canadian and it is quite difficult to explain to her that if you have any real fascination with English football, you cannot just walk away from a loss in the semifinals of the World Cup by saying “Oh well.” A particular, collectively hoarded mental illness demands that you feel a kind of sickening atemporality in the minutes after, a disbelief that there is nothing more that can happen, ever. The clock has run out and will not begin again. Then comes the real bad feeling: The 24–48 hour infection of everything in the world with a sense of waste and pointlessness.
This is just the stupid British disease, my girlfriend says.
What?
This endless pathology of fucking decline. This bottomless narcissistic obsession. England didn’t win the World Cup, and it’s not the king of the world. So what? That’s fine! England’s tortured relationship with its football team, with football “coming home”—it’s just boring unresolved trauma about Britain’s diminished postwar status. This country needs therapy. It needs to be OK with being fine. You are not allowed to moan about this for the next week. I will leave you. I will take our child to Canada, where we aren’t constantly having a mental breakdown about only being a middle power.
Kiss on the head. This feeling, to be fair, probably isn’t the healthiest inheritance.
Two years ago, on the eve of the UK’s 2024 general election, I wrote a piece for n+1about, among other things, expectation management. Back then, the country was exhausted from a decade and a half of Tory misrule—poorer, unhealthier, less equal, its rivers full of sewage, its children literally shorter. The incoming Labour government offered hope of a modest and muted quality. Less radical overhaul than managerial competence—some of which was required. The Tories, as their incumbency drew on, had become more and more obviously corrupt: crooked Covid PPE procurement contracts, cronyism rampant among official appointments, even MP betting scandals related to election dates. There was an appetite for a vision of professional, boring governance.
But there was also an appetite for ambition, and for real change, and on these fronts the new government’s offer was lacking. I found myself cataloging the ways Starmer had repositioned the party towards the center: Out were “commitments to green investment, new taxes on top earners, abolishing the House of Lords, abolishing caps on benefits for multiple children”; in were “plans for ‘consequences’ for those not looking for work, a ‘border force command’ to curb migration, and skepticism about teaching ‘gender ideology’ in school.”
Yet however much this was telegraphed, however much Starmer purged the party of opposition and beat on its left flank, however much the evidence urged caution, I desired, deeply, to remain hopeful; I was, I wrote, “stuck between the necessity of this hope and the insistence of my doubts.” I’m not sure, however, that I hadn’t hoped so hard it had become a belief—and belief, in an Eagletonian sense, requires more than hope, and perhaps more than I had. “It may be rational to hope that something will come about,” he writes, “but irrational to believe that it will.” Perhaps I desired my hopes enough to have been sold some optimism. Considering the exile of the Labour left, the overall sense that the package amounted to little more than Not The Tories: Was it irrational to even hope for anything?
Maybe this is just more indulgence. The achievements of the Starmer administration have been, I grant it, real: renationalization of the railways; removal of hereditary peers; the Employment Rights Act, which promised the largest expansion of worker protections in four decades, and sort of delivered; the Renters’ Rights Act, which stripped power from letting agents and landlords and had an immediate, positive impact on my own housing situation. Unlike Cameron, who resigned after making a generational blunder—or Johnson, hoist in scandal—or Truss, too obviously an insane idiot—Starmer was forced to resign because, well, he wasn’t very good and no one liked him. He was ruthless, inflexible, a terrible communicator, an ally to the stiffest proceduralism, and in the end, the hated enemy of both left and right. He apologized to Epstein’s victims for the appointment of Peter Mandleson and then blamed the foreign office. His government recognized Palestinian statehood but actively assisted the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. To the British public, beyond any single failing, he seemed simply to have catastrophically mismanaged the vibes.
What about Burnham? If Starmer quickly came to be seen as a soulless administrator, a machine without a ghost, then Burnham has so far projected something like its opposite: He is more comfortable in himself and, by way of his northern accent and tenure as mayor of Manchester, unable to be lumped in with the “London elite” or the “Westminster bubble,” however much his sixteen years as an MP, prior to leaving Westminster for municipal politics, places, him firmly within both.
In his first speech as Labour leader, at the Trade Unions Congress in London, Burnham promised a “new politics” that eschews political point-scoring and focuses on problem-solving. Sure. More noteworthy was his explicit rejection of the political and economic consensus of the past fifty years. “Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our Party,” he said. “Political power was centralised and economic power was privatised,” which led, of course, to more wealth and authority in ever fewer hands. To remedy these past errors, Burnham promised “sufficient public control” over the cost of “the essentials” (housing, water, energy, transport); “more power to reindustrialise;” more power to “build an education system based on parity between academic and technical education;” and as the mechanism to catalyze these changes, more power to local governments.
If you’re worried that “sufficient public control” does not, precisely, mean renationalization, and “more power” does not yet precisely mean anything—fear not. This speech also took “hope” for another seven outings. “We are going to give them hope back;” “I believe a united Labour Party and Labour movement is the best hope for our country;” “hope for every young person is what we are going to be about;” “more power to bring back the hope we have all been missing too much;” “the Party that puts more power in people’s hands, drives good growth in every postcode and puts hope in every heart;” “to bring back hope;” “we are united and we put the power that comes from that unity at the service of people and places who have been waiting too long for politics to let them hope again.” Though Burnham’s slogan, “For Us,” doesn’t actually use the word (he is British, after all), to me these manifestations of hope, especially regarding Labour in-fighting and factionalism, feel very much like hopes For Him. I hope he achieves all he has set out to do, and more. But it is easier to imagine the end of the world, the end of capitalism, and England winning the World Cup all on the same day than it is to imagine genuine unity in the British Labour Party. Only an optimist could believe that.
Saturday night. Time to go to the pub! My brother is unsure. Why? It’s the third-place playoff between England and France. It’s going to be weird and pointless and probably really boring. Fair enough, I say, fair critique—but we must. We have come this far. We must!
In truth, I am not expecting much. These third-place games have a certain unreal quality. They can break the spell of a tournament, make you realize that the games are not scheduled according to some inherent law of the universe but are just some stuff we do. The Winchester, when we arrive, is emptier than on a regular Saturday night. Only the real freaks are out for this one. They haven’t even turned on all the TVs. The bar is empty; we’re served immediately. My brother sighs. Might not stay for the whole thing, he says. I turn away from the game briefly. It’s the second minute. By the time I turn back England have scored. Declan Rice, with a solid shot from outside the box, apparently, but I’m left waiting for the replay. Goddamn it. I bet that’s the only good bit of the match.
But over its next nine goals, the game only gets better. By halftime, we’re up 4–0, and the pub has filled with people who have no doubt seen the scoreline and decided to come out. Can’t blame them I suppose, but for their tardiness they’re treated, when play resumes, to a half-hour spell of what you really watch football to feel: deep, unpleasant anxiety. France brings it back to 4–3. Then England is awarded and scores a penalty to make it 5–3. Surely we’re safe? No! France scores again! 5–4. Only in the final seconds of stoppage time does Bellingham makes a virtuosic one-man run to the French goal. 6–4.
Throughout, it’s an odd show; the highwire tension of the tournament lacking, but in its stead a genuine kind of levity. Mbappé smiles the whole time. Bellingham is a gent and lets Saka take the penalty so he can complete his hat trick. There’s an absurdity to the final score, and players from both teams hug and congratulate one another other in apparently sincere high spirits. I text my girlfriend: Hilarious, perfect game. She replies: I was counting goals by the way the neighbors were shouting.
Who could have hoped for this? Who could have expected it?
Expectation, in most general definitions of hope, is not a variety but a component: Hope is expectation plus desire. It is a strong faith or anticipation about what should happen. Its archaic form relates to money, to inheritance, which is where, of course, Dickens lays his original pun. In its continuous form, and without an object, it takes on a euphemistic aspect with which we are all familiar: to be expecting. My girlfriend, in the early stages of her pregnancy, says that she found it a useful formulation. It was talismanic, to be expecting, at the time where you most expect things might go wrong.
A common question, for a certain span of your life and before you have children, or before it is increasingly likely you will have children, is: Do you want children? But as becomes immediately obvious when the proposition moves from the theoretical to the considered to the acted-upon to the increasingly immanent, one will never be delivered children, not the intangible idea of them, only ever a specific child or children, who as they move closer to realization make a mockery of the question.
In this sense, these specific circumstances of expectation blur the line between optimism and hope. The official, institutional, medical frameworks of pregnancy are inherently optimistic: They assume. The due-date calculation, the scan, the patronizing advice leaflets, the various appointments; they impose a timeline based on a general, statistically likely future. The personal experience is hopeful: riven by doubts and worries, persisted in and wondered about, the specifics of health, name, sex, delivery and personhood left open, monitored in the peripheral vision—but the wholeness of the situation undeniably future-oriented. The expectations are great because although they are resolutely there, they haven’t yet decided exactly what they are.
By the next World Cup in 2030, our kid, whoever they are, and with the permission of circumstance, will be four. Old enough to be both fascinated and disappointed by England—and maybe just old enough to begin to will for it something better.
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