Thomas Tuchel and ‘earning the right’ to sing the English national anthem. Discuss.

There are many ways to consider football. It is a sport. It is an industry. It is a political vehicle and an advertising billboard and a content engine and an unrivalled cultural phenomenon. Every so often, though, something happens that makes you wonder if, more than anything, it is actually a piece of absurdist performance art, one designed to illustrate the irrationality of the human experience.

In a way, there is something deeply impressive about the game’s ability to generate a stream of nonsense that is both constant and also original. Football, in its codified form, has been around for almost 150 years. It has, for more than a quarter of a century at the very least, been the most popular pastime in human history. It is subject to saturation coverage, its every breath scrutinised forensically in a Babel of languages. 

And yet, reliably, it retains a capacity to conjure storylines so convoluted and ludicrous that it is essentially impossible to explain them to anyone without a fairly in-depth interest in the sport. It is what might be described as the Space Monkey Tendency, in honour of what remains (amid fairly strong competition) the finest example of the genre.

To recap, although whether the whole incident can be neatly summarised is essentially impossible: in 2013, Roy Hodgson, then the England manager, gave a speech at half-time in a game in which he drew an admittedly improbable parallel between his tactics and a NASA programme that involved sending monkeys into space.

Nobody present for the speech was offended. (They may well have been confused, but that is different.) Several players made it clear, when the story emerged, that they understood what Hodgson had been trying to say. (Again: really?) And yet still, within a couple of days, Hodgson was apparently embroiled in a “race row”, and eventually had to issue a public apology.

For a long time, the only incident that came close to matching that was the week when Match of the Day, a staple of British television broadcasts since the 1960s, was broadcast in mournful silence because Gary Lineker had criticised the immigration policies of the British government on social media. 

There had, both predictably and immediately, been a backlash from the country’s populist right, the sort of people who believe in the absolutism of free speech so long as the views expressed are ones they share. The BBC duly caved, and withdrew Lineker from his usual presenting duties. His regular rotation of pundits immediately announced that they would not do the show without him.

For a while, it looked like it might be cancelled altogether, only for a compromise to be found in which the highlights were shown, but there were no studio segments. Lots of people said they preferred it.

That was only two years ago. It definitely happened. Even now, though, it has the quality of a fever dream, or a weak episode of Black Mirror.

Kudos to Thomas Tuchel, then, that he has needed just two months or so in situ as England manager to add his own name to the list. Announcing his first squad in his new role, Tuchel was asked whether he intended to sing the English national anthem before England’s 2026 World Cup qualifiers against Albania and Latvia.

This question, of course, is ridiculous in and of itself. It does not matter in the slightest if Tuchel sings the national anthem. Loads of people do not sing the national anthem. Also, Tuchel is German, so in a lot of ways it would be sort of strange for him to sing the English national anthem. But also not strange at all, because it is just a song, and not even an especially good song, definitely not as good as Houdini by Dua Lipa, and who cares whether someone sings it.

Tuchel will have been well aware, though, that the issue of whether he was going to belt out God Save the King was likely to be something of a hot topic, not least because there had been a mild furore when his (interim) predecessor, Lee Carsley, had said he would not sing it last year. That prompted at least a week’s worth of coverage, because the British press can be relied upon to feast on the lowest-hanging fruits.

To avoid that, Tuchel came up with what he presumably thought was quite a smart answer to the riddle. No, he said, he was not going to sing it. Not because he is German. Not because the song itself is terrible. Not because he hews to the interpretation of the journalist Barney Ronay that God Save the King is a hymn to an entity that might not exist to protect one that definitely shouldn’t.

No, he was not going to sing it because he felt he had to “earn the right” to do so. 

“I feel it is not just a given,” he said. “You cannot just sing it.” (You definitely can, it’s easy, you don’t even need to be good at singing.) “First of all, you have a very powerful, emotional and meaningful national anthem.” (No we don’t, you’re thinking of La Marseillaise.) “It means everything. It means a lot to me.” (Why?) “But I feel because it is that meaningful, that emotional and so powerful that I have to earn my right to sing it.”

Quite where this logic — of treating the singing of a national anthem like calling up a young player to the senior team — leads us is not quite clear. Tuchel suggested that he might feel it fitting to join in when he has been getting “results, building the team, doing my job properly”. But that does not stand up to scrutiny, because by the same logic Dan Burn would not be able to sing it until he has proved he can perform for England.

Far more coherent was Tuchel’s suggestion that he might have to “dive more into the culture”, to feel more like he is “one of our own”, before he feels it is the right thing to do. What form that might take is not clear. Does he have to master the art of slapping his knees and saying “well, must be getting on” in order to end a social occasion? Is it to do with the volume of tea consumed? Does he need to invade another country and steal its ancient treasures? 

Or, of course, he could really double down, and suggest that the most English thing to do is not to sing the anthem at all. What the philosopher Roger Scruton termed “oikophobia” — the “need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ours” — has long been a trait of a certain stripe of English (self-described) intellectuals.

In the spirit of triangulation, though, perhaps there is a third way: acknowledging the absurdity of it all. The whole debate, after all, is a false one. The people who care about whether Tuchel sings the anthem or not will not be mollified by him mouthing along to the words; what they really object to is the fact that a German is in charge of the national team.

And the people who don’t care about his nationality also do not care about whether he sings the national anthem; most of them probably understand that a German may not be especially enthusiastic at the prospect of doing so, even though the song is actually about a German, if you go back far enough. (The King, not God.)

Nobody, on either side, is going to be persuaded. Better, instead, to wait it out. Should Tuchel win the World Cup, it is unlikely to be mentioned. And even if he does not, football will come to his rescue: at some point in the coming weeks or months, something else will occur, something ridiculous and inscrutable, and a debate about whether you must earn your right to sing a national anthem will suddenly seem perfectly reasonable, just another aspect of football’s circus of the absurd.

(Top photo: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)