Here’s some things which are synonymous with the run up to Christmas.
Having your first mulled wine of the season at an outdoor Christmas market. Christmas dinners and drinks with multiple friendship groups, plus work. Perhaps, braving the shops over the Black Friday weekend. Marvelling at your town’s Christmas lights and window displays.
Here’s some things that don’t feature highly in our favourite festive traditions.
Dodging crowds of pissed football fans as they loudly – often intimidatingly – celebrate or commiserate their team’s latest World Cup result. Having the usual radio soundtrack of Wham! and Mariah Carey rudely interrupted with the forgettable football anthems of tournaments gone by. The sparkly lights and fresh pine smell of your favourite local pub’s festive décor ruined by tacky England flags and other football paraphernalia.
Everything about the 2022 FIFA World Cup is wrong. From the ongoing controversy surrounding host nation Qatar’s abhorrent human rights record and the alleged corruption that lead to them securing the bid in the first place, to fans having rainbow merchandise confiscated and even the fact that the whole thing is set against the backdrop of a world in crisis, it’s really falling short when it comes to embodying the merriment normally associated with a global sporting event of this scale. But right up there with the worst of this tournament’s offences is that it is completely ruining Christmas.
There, I said it.
Under normal circumstances, even those of us who don’t follow sports are happy to have one summer in every four encroached upon by the relentless football-mania that suffocates our towns and cities for the month of the competition. While there is always a sinister undercurrent to major tournaments – Women’s Aid this year reports that even when the England team wins or draws their matches, domestic abuse cases increase by 26% – the general vibe of sunny beer gardens and pints with pals makes it a quintessential seasonal tradition that we’re all happy to indulge in on occasion. But the depths of winter, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, is a time for sparkly lights, warming drinks, glamorous parties and cosy nights in with friends and family. For Kevin the Carrot and Dr Who specials. Christmas is to winter what football tournaments (and rained out BBQs) are to the Great British Summertime – that is to say, inextricably dependent on the context of the season. Neither works outside of it (unless you're in Australia, obviously).
Add to that the fact that we haven’t actually even had a proper Christmas in two years. During the 2020 Euros – which actually took place in 2021 due to the fact global communities still hadn’t worked out the logistics of running tournaments of that size in the first throes of the pandemic – huge concessions were made to accommodate football fans and their traditions, with millions descending on London to watch matches at Wembley, despite other large-scale celebrations like Notting Hill Carnival and Gay Pride still being cancelled, and the spillages from pubs onto pavements indistinguishable from pre-pandemic times. Fast forward to Christmas and the increase in cases that the cold weather brought, and it was an all-together more sombre affair. Most workplaces were still choosing not to host parties for fear of employees not being able to celebrate the big day with family, pubs and restaurants were still enforcing mask wearing and other restrictions at their discretion and there was the omnipresent threat of a swift and total lockdown, a la Christmas 2020, looming over the whole thing.
So now that we’re finally allowed to celebrate the season properly again, regrettable office flings and all, it’s more than a little frustrating to find that we’re having to alter, rearrange or cancel plans all together to avoid the football revelry. During the England v USA match, I had been out for a Christmas dinner with friends in Birmingham, but we swiftly had to abandon drinks afterward when we found all the city centre pubs were overrun with disappointed, predominantly male football fans who’d been drinking since 3pm. Sure, there’s often football or other sports on in the festive run up, but it’s normally easy enough to avoid the bars and pubs with screens in them in favour of ones with live music or quieter, cosier vibes. During the World Cup or the Euros, you’d be hard pushed to find an establishment that hasn’t chosen to capitalise on the money-making potential of hoards of men drinking their way through an England match by putting a projector or two up.
And none of that is to mention the fact that it’s dark by 4pm. Ask any woman or femme identifying person and she’ll tell you that, in the winter, the decision to go out and about when it’s dark outside isn’t one to be taken lightly. On your average Tuesday, popping out to Tesco for your dinner after work might seem like a negligible risk, but today’s England v Wales match means that I, for one, have already got my food shop in in the daylight so as to avoid the inevitable increase in drunk men out on the streets after dark.
Of course, there will be loads of people for whom the football being on at Christmas is all the more reason to celebrate, and while the game is still undoubtedly gendered, a sizeable minority of those claiming pubs and bars for their own this tournament will be women. And it’s really not to suggest that football fans are doing anything wrong by cheering on their teams in the same way they’ve always done – namely, drinking too much and shouting too loudly – but I can’t help feeling a little resentful that, for the third year running, my favourite time of year is looking completely different to normal. With the final not until the 20th of December and the reverberations of the tournament likely to last well into the New Year, it looks like we’ll still have to wait one more year for a proper Christmas.