GP: In late 2019, as an unknowing world prepared for what it assumed would remain Euro 2020, FourFourTwo asked me to write a lengthy look back at Euro 96. I happily did so, providing about 6,000 words for the February 2020 cover story. The folks at FFT planned to reuse the sections online during the tournament – but a pandemic brought that plan forward, at the same time as pushing back Euro 2020 to Euro 2021. Maybe I’ll write about that tournament in 2045.

You know the story of Euro 96, right? A footballing opera played out against a backdrop of endless summer, to the musical backing of a timeless theme song, with cameo roles for great goals, and that most enduring of central themes: an England side coming up agonisingly short. (Even before the tournament, it was “30 years of hurt”; it’s now well into its mid-fifties.) Why must the gods frown upon the righteous?

Except that as is so often the case, the pocket opera only tells half the story. Euro 96 was far more nuanced, complicated and, frankly, mixed than that. Albeit not on this subject, Charles Dickens wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Euro 96 had its fair share of highs, some of which fed into an oversimplified shorthand; it also had some lows, which did the same. 

It certainly had a lot of stories which now struggle to be heard. Equally, some of what you might have heard is wrong, including what formation England played. Such can be the effect of the telescoping of history as events disappear into the rear-view mirror. 

Media microscopes

Because so many of the dramatis personae – from Southgate to Shearer and Gazza to G-Nev, not to mention your Skinners, Baddiels and Gallaghers in the audience – still stalk the stage of our football theatre, it feels in some way like only yesterday. But it isn’t. It’s now further from the present than it was from the Three-Day Week, the Vietnam War, the opening of the Sydney Opera House and the eradication of smallpox.  

This was, without wishing to worry you, A Different Time. From our hindsight-filled vantage point in what was then the distant future – Blade Runner, with its synthetic humans bio-engineered to work on colonies in space, was set in 2019 – the biggest single difference was the lack of internet: only 2% of Britain had a reliable regular connection. Very few people had mobile phones at all, let alone perma-networked smartphones. The nearest thing to social media was graffiti. Or the pub.

Having a relatively focused audience gave immense power to the few. With musical piracy limited to home taping, overpriced CDs sold in their millions, their profits turbocharging an industry in its pomp and making pampered princes of its big names. 

The masses consumed entertainment via a media that was only just starting to fragment: in an era of little choice, the public had to want what the public got. Sky had made a splash with its newfangled Premier League (or Premiership, as it became from its second season upon being sponsored by a lager company), but still only one in ten Brits had satellite or cable; the vast majority unable to access Kelvin Mackenzie’s L!ve TV, with its topless darts and weather forecasts presented by dwarves on trampolines, made do with just the four terrestrial channels. 

The war between tabloid newspapers was at its peak, with The Sun nearing 4m sales and the Mirror, under a try-hard attentionaholic called Piers Morgan, somewhere around 2.5m, as was the staidly middle-class Daily Mail. Two things all the papers loved was prurient no-you-mustn’t-look coverage of “scandal” and the national pastime of criticising the England team. And to be frank, they often had good reason to. 

England’s not dreaming

Revisionist history suggests England went into Euro 96 confident. They did not. From this distance – there’s that telescoping again – the semi-final campaigns of Italia 90 and Euro 96 are near-neighbours, but between them was a turgid half-decade: Graham Taylor’s one-dimensional embarrassment of a team was gormless at Euro 92 and absent at USA 94. 

Enter Terry Venables, who knew the size of the task when he became England’s first head coach – some at the FA didn’t want him to be ennobled with “manager” – in January 1994. As someone who’d been abroad without packing baked beans and fishfingers, the former Barcelona manager popularly known as El Tel was well aware of England’s isolationism, as he told FourFourTwo just before Euro 96: “I was at a conference a few years ago in Sweden and we were a joke, people were laughing at us, at our tactics.”

Venables would install an eagerness to learn (“Why shouldn’t we study football?”) but public enthusiasm remained low. Automatic qualification for Euro 96 as hosts meant two years of friendlies which brought pressure without pleasure. As Alan Shearer noted, “England don’t have friendly games. If you play badly you’re going to get hammered.”

Most of the games took place at a frequently echoing Wembley: Venables’ second game, against Greece, attracted just 23,000. In February 1995 England ventured abroad as far as Lansdowne Road, Dublin, and lasted as long as 27 minutes before rioting idiots forced the match’s abandonment.  

Off the field, Venables had never been to everyone’s taste; MP Kate Hoey, never shy of a soapbox, used parliamentary privilege to call him unfit for the job. His various legal battles – involving Alan Sugar, Panorama, Scotland Yard, the Daily Mirror, bungs allegations (unproven), a judge calling him “not entirely reliable” and the Department of Trade and Industry starting proceedings to disqualify him as a director – became tabloid fodder, and the East End lad struck some FA suits as a little too wide for their narrow idea of an England gaffer. Contracted until Euro 96, Venables requested an extension the FA could not uniformly agree upon: ludicrously, he was offered an extra year, to halfway through qualification for France 98. In January 1996, he declared his intention to leave after the tournament, whatever the outcome. 

On the field, Venables’ methods were working but serious doubts remained. Alan Shearer had scored 130 goals in 171 games for Blackburn, but just five in 23 for England, with none in a yawning 21-month gap back to September 1994. Others accused Venables of favouring players connected to his old club Spurs, like Teddy Sheringham, who later told FFT “My association with him didn’t go down well with the press, who said I was one of Terry’s boys.”

FFT’s tournament preview was typical of the downbeat expectations: “England have never really created the quality and quantity of chances a striker like Shearer needs when he’s been fit and in the team. Too often he’s been seen drifting out wide to get the ball and putting in crosses to a penalty box populated entirely by defenders.” 

At the other end, said FFT, “It’s hard for Venables to know whether his defence has really been tested. England’s most competitive games have been in the Umbro Cup where, with a few experimental lineups and a completely new back four against Japan, they failed to keep a clean sheet.” Asked to select an XI from the tournament squads, Coventry manager Ron Atkinson only picked one of Venables’ squad, Paul Ince.

Endless summer? The forecasts were somewhat gloomy. 

Hosts with the most (grounds)

Things had been much worse, though. Euro 96 was a key part of the English game’s rehabilitation into European football after the 1985 Heysel disaster and subsequent half-decade ban. Pre-Heysel, the FA had bid to host Euro 88, which could’ve been awkward had the offer not been easily outvoted by the one from the DfB. “West Germany’s presentation was far better than ours,” fair-copped FA chairman Bert Millichip. “That gave me an insight into what we had to do.”

What they did was a good old-fashioned handshake deal behind closed doors. England entered an entente cordiale in which they would step down from bidding for the 1998 World Cup in return for a Gallic nod for the 96 bid. With chief rivals the Dutch conveniently opting to focus on a bid for 200o instead, other bids from Austria, Greece and Portugal were outvoted at a UEFA ExCo meeting in Lisbon on 5 May 1992. The game was afoot. 

Within six months, the game had changed. Those bids had been for a tournament hosting eight teams at four venues – expected to be Wembley, Villa Park, Old Trafford and one of Elland Road, St James’ Park or Roker Park. However, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and fracturing of Eastern Europe, UEFA’s membership numbers were about to mushroom from 35 to 47 countries, and with FIFA expanding their own quadrennial jamboree from 24 to 32 teams, suddenly UEFA’s table-for-eight didn’t seem like much of a party. Couldn’t squeeze a few more in, could you? Call it a nice round 16 teams in eight venues?

There was some talk of involving Cardiff Arms Park (this being pre-Millennium) in a joint England/Wales hosting, but English stadia were about to upgrade due to the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough Disaster, so the FA had a reasonable choice. Elland Road and St James’ got the nod, joined by Anfield, the City Ground and Hillsborough itself as well as Old Trafford, Villa Park and Wembley itself. 

Getting there

The 46 potentials were whittled down to 15 guests in the usual array of hammerings and heartbreaks. Spain racked up 26 points out of 30. France conceded two in 10 games and scored 10 in one, against hapless new kids Azerbaijan. But at least they finished with a point in Poland: fellow greenhorns Estonia got no points and just three goals.

Not that it all went to form. Trapped in a three-way battle with the Czechs and Norway, the Dutch required the play-offs. There they faced the Republic of Ireland – who had just about held off Northern Ireland –and promptly dismantled them in an Anfield match described by FourFourTwo as “like watching Liverpool against Rochdale”; Jack Charlton resigned. 

At least they had their memories. A spot-kick away from reaching USA 94, Wales were miles away from qualifying for a crack at the Saesnegs. Under Mike Smith and then the despised Bobby Gould, they finished a distant fifth despite somehow conjuring a 1-1 draw in Dusseldorf. (Spoiler alert: the Germans qualified.)

Bouncing back from missing their first World Cup in six, Scotland qualified with the second-best defensive record – three goals conceded in 10 games – and were rewarded with a dream draw against the Auld Enemy, along with the Swiss and Dutch. 

Pre-party panic

As the June 8 kick-off neared, preparations were far from smooth. In fact, bickering abounded. Newcastle City Council considered suing the government over lack of funding: one organiser called it a “frigging nightmare”, another said the FA was “unable to organise a piss-up in a brewery”. The FA called the government “startlingly short-sighted”. “It's a typically botched, last-minute cock-up,” sighed John Williams, of the Sir Norman Chester Foundation for Football Research. “Only this country could ever run an event like this.”

In late May, Venables named a 27-man squad, soon to be cut to the final 22. Mark Wright, the Italia 90 sweeper who had missed Euro 92 through injury, was struck again by a knee ligament strain and never played for England again. Neither did Peter Beardsley, by now 35. Rob Lee, Dennis Wise, Ugo Ehiogu and Jason Wilcox also made way. 

Of the 22 Venables chose, only nine had won more than 10 caps before the tournament started; for comparison, in Bobby Robson’s Euro 88 squad that ratio was 17 out of 20. (Perhaps notably, only four of the squad had been born on That Day In 1966.) Furthermore, two young West Ham lads called Frank Lampard (18) and Rio Ferdinand (17) were invited to train with the England squad at the tournament. 

First, though, Venables took his team to the far east, where they beat China before facing something called a Hong Kong Golden Select XI, who played all in pink and featured 36-year-old Mike Duxbury, 34-year-old Carlton Fairweather and 34-year-old Dave Watson. A narrow 1-0 win had the Daily Mail spluttering “A bunch of has-beens show up a bunch of wannabes”, but more faux-outrage was to follow. 

Knowing Paul Gascoigne was keen to celebrate his birthday a day early, and aware that his players needed to relax ahead of the official naming of his 22-man squad, Venables allowed his merry men out to a nearby bar – chaperoned by his assistant Bryan Robson, never a man to shy from a sherbert. Soon enough, various players were splayed backwards in the bar’s signature gimmick, a dentist’s chair in which patrons perched to have their gullets filled with spirits. 

With the carnage caught on camera, the press enjoyed its usual orgasms of outrage, employing the moralistic doublethink of condemning indiscretions it revels in revealing. This was the era of laddism and Loaded, of Oasis’s Gallagher brothers filling stadiums and gossip columns, of Men Behaving Badly – which started its fifth season of bantering blokes and their eye-rolling “birds” during Euro 96 – averaging 13 million viewers per episode. Booze was big news. Tutting beckoned. 

The Sun led with the headline “Disgracefool”, targeting Gascoigne (“Look at Gazza… a drunken oaf with no pride”) before dismissing the entire squad’s chances: “the only thing we’ll win is the Men Behaving Badly trophy for drunken also-rans.” 

Working around a low press

Typically ebullient, Gascoigne later told FFT: “I only went in for a filling!” But there was more to it than that. “I was first in the chair because it looked like a laugh,” explained Gascoigne, outlining his default modus operandi. “Then a few of the other lads did it. It was good for team spirit.” 

Spirit and bonding are phrases which recur in accounts from those who were there. All these years later, Bryan Robson tells FFT that “A lot was made of what happened, but it was blown out of all proportion. It was Gazza’s birthday, all the players had been really good up until that point, they hadn’t been allowed to have a drink – but we finished the game in Hong Kong and Terry gave his permission to the boys to go out for a couple of hours and celebrate with Gazza. It helped the lads bond and come together as a group. They knew they’d trained really hard.”

Paul Ince concurs, calling it a “bonding session: we had a great time.” And those bonds were needed as the story grew.  Embarrassment was exacerbated when the airline bringing the squad back claimed that £5,000 worth of damage had been done to a TV and a table, which made you wonder precisely where they bought their TVs and tables. 

The moral guardians of Fleet Street were outraged on the nation’s behalf. “We pay lip service to drunken, flatulent, screen-smashing yobs by calling them heroes, aware that if they were unable to kick a ball in approximately the right direction they would be up in court,” said the Daily Mail’s rent-a-thunderer Jeff Powell.

In came another oar from Conservative MP John Carlisle, who raged “The culprits should be identified, publicly exposed and thrown out of the squad at once. And if that includes Paul Gascoigne, then so be it."

The players were initially shocked by the reaction: by the idea that the popular press could turn the team into pariahs just before a crucial tournament, exaggerating every detail and even – prepare yourself – stretching the truth. “We were surprised by some of the stories off the back of it because they weren’t true,” said Steve McManaman, the wiry-legged winger who had been front and centre of the dental-stimulus imagery. “Talk about negative press.” 

The FA stayed quiet for five days before the squad accepted collective responsibility. Forced together by a snarling press, the squad adopted the siege mentality preferred by Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United. As Shearer said, “Terry used the whole thing in a positive way. ‘The world’s against us,’ he told us. ‘If it’s a fight they want, let’s give ‘em a fight.’”

Sheringham – another central photo figure – thoroughly agreed. “We had so much stick going into the Euros,” he said. “All we did was make it work for us. Yes, it was a prove 'em wrong approach – but it worked.” That us-v-them spirit never really left the squad, whether the tabloids were vilifying them or deifying them. And it was certainly the first to start with. Once they were deemed targets, the paparazzi followed them. 

 Ince tells FFT how upon their return to England, under a tabloid hate campaign, Venables gave them a couple of days off; Ince went to a pub in Epping, “met a couple of friends and just had a couple of beers. All of a sudden there was all these press, taking pictures over the hedge in Epping Forest. Next thing, in the News of the World, it was ‘Do they ever stop drinking?’. 

“I felt like some of the press were against us, and that brought us all together. All of the criticism from the dentist’s chair, it made us stronger and mentally tougher, to prove that we were going to go out and do the business.”

Welcoming Europe

Not many shared the England squad’s belief. As FFT put it before the tournament, “Only the most fervent optimist (and people whose surname happens to be Venables) think England are going to storm home. No, the big questions for Brits are will we see some good football? Will there be any violence? And, for those who are really serious about the long-term future of the beautiful game, will the Championships create a boom which benefits grassroots football in Britain?”

The Dutch were strong favourites at 9-2, with groupmates Italy and Germany next at 5-1 and England’s 7-1 probably lowered by bookies minimising risk against the usual weight of patriotic bets. Scotland were out at 50-1 with Switzerland and Turkey, with only the Czech Republic (80-1) given longer odds.   

Indeed, much of the pretournament excitement was away from England, for whom just being there (unlike in 94) was a boon. It was about hosting, and meeting lots of new friends. FourFourTwo’s pre-tournament issue had a sidebar called “Who the hell is Zinedine Zidane?” (“a good example of ‘crazy name, sensible guy’ syndrome”).  

And around the country, visitors were rocking up at incongruous locations. The Czechs descended on the Preston Marriott Hotel and bought Kiss Me Quick hats on Blackpool promenade, while fitting in a warm-up game at non-league Bamber Bridge. 

Down the road in Wrightington were the third-best team in the world, according to FIFA’s rankings: Russia, whose press officer Lev Zarakhovich was able to straight-face his way through the memorable line “Training has been cancelled. They have the day off and are planning a shopping spree in Wigan.” Croatia settled into the Barnsdale Country Club in Rutland, from where their daily newspaper Vjesnik waxed lyrical about “the hunting lodge of William II, the oasis of peace, seclusion and idyll..." The Dutch, based in Birmingham, had a hiccup when Edwin van der Sar managed to leave his passport on a school bus. 

Not everybody was happy. Settling near Macclesfield, the Germans were unimpressed by the surface quality of nearby Moss Rose, sending Town’s manager Steve Burr into passive aggression: “Our ground is certainly not as smooth as Old Trafford, but it is in good condition. But when Berti Vogts says the ground is bad, then it is bad. He is world champion, and we are only semi-professionals.”

Also unimpressed were the Bulgarians. With fixtures in Leeds then Newcastle, they split the difference and opted to stay 12 miles outside Scarborough. But those who had seen the bright lights of USA 94, Barcelona and Parma were strangely unaffected by the charms of the Yorkshire seaside: “Scarborough is boring,” decreed Hristo Stoichkov as the squad decamped early – and moved to Stockton-on-Tees. Clearly, not everything about Euro 96 would go to script...

Originally published as part of the cover story of FourFourTwo’s February 2020 issue, then online.