England–Germany football rivalry
The English and German national football teams have played each other since the end of the 19th century; officially since 1930. The teams met for the first time in November 1899, when England beat Germany in four straight matches. Notable matches between England and Germany include the 1966 FIFA World Cup final, the semifinals of the 1990 FIFA World Cup, the semifinals of UEFA Euro 1996, the round of sixteen of the 2010 FIFA World Cup and UEFA Euro 2020. While the English public, football fans and in particular newspapers consider an England–Germany football rivalry to have developed, it is mostly an English phenomenon since most German fans consider the Netherlands or Italy to be their traditional footballing rivals.
''In this article, references to the German football team include the former West Germany football team before German reunification.''
History
Early encounters
instigated a four-game tour of Germany and Austria by a representative England team in November 1899. The England team played a representative German team in Berlin on 23 November 1899, with the German side losing 1–0. Two days later a slightly altered German side lost 10–2. The third and fourth matches were played in Prague and Karlsruhe against a combined Austrian and German side, and England won 6–0 and 7–0. Those games cannot be considered as "official" and are known as "proto-international matches" in Germany because they were organised by a regional federation from Berlin and the German Football Association was not founded until 28 January 1900. On the other hand, the DFB considers four matches played between 1908 and 1913 against the England national amateur football team of the FA as official matches against England, while the FA does not.The first ever full international between the two teams was a friendly match played on Saturday 10 May 1930, in Berlin. England were 1–0 and 2–1 up in the game, but after losing a player to injury went behind 3–2, before a late goal from David Jack brought the score to 3–3, which was how the game finished.
The next match between the two teams was played on 4 December 1935, at White Hart Lane in London, the first full international to take place between the teams in England and the first since the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. It was also the first match to stir up particular controversy, as The Observer newspaper reported protests by the British Trades Union Congress that the game could be used as a propaganda event by the Nazi regime. "No recent sporting event has been treated with such high seriousness in Germany as this match... Between 7,500 and 8,000 Germans will travel via Dover, and special trains will bring them to London. A description broadcast throughout Germany... Sir Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the TUC, in a further letter to Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary, said that 'such a large and carefully organised Nazi contingent coming to London might confirm the impression among people in this country that the event is being regarded as of some political importance by the visitors'."
Of the match itself, however, which England won 3–0, the same newspaper reported the following week that: "So chivalrous in heart and so fair in tackling were the English and German teams who played at Tottenham in mid-week that even the oldest of veterans failed to recall an international engagement played with such good manners by everybody."
The next game between the two teams, and the last to be played before the Second World War, was again in Germany, a friendly at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin on 14 May 1938, played in front of a crowd of 110,000 people. It was the last time England played against a unified German team until the 1990s. This was the most controversial of all the early encounters between the two teams, as before kick-off the English players were ordered by the Foreign Office to line up and perform a Nazi salute in respect to their hosts. How compliant the players were with this situation has been a matter of debate, with a feature in The Observer in 2001 speculating that they were "perhaps merely indifferent players."
A BBC News Online report published in 2003 reported that the salute was calculated to show: "that Germany, which two months earlier had annexed Austria, was not a pariah state. The friendly game effectively helped clear the way for Chamberlain's "Peace for our time" deal with Hitler, which, in turn, led to Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia." England won the match 6–3, but according to German writer Ulrich Linder, author of the book Strikers for Hitler: "To lose to England at the time was nothing unusual because basically everybody lost to at the time. For Hitler, the propaganda effect of that game was more important than anything else."
The two countries did not meet again on a football pitch for sixteen years. Two German states had been founded in 1949, with the Germany national football team continuing its tradition, based in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1990. The German Democratic Republic fielded a separate national football team; although the English did play some matches against them, the rivalry never developed the same edge or high-profile. A third German team, Saarland, also briefly existed between 1950 and 1956. However they never played a match against England.
In a friendly at Wembley Stadium on 1 December 1954, England won 3–1 against an under-strength West German side, who were at the time the champions of the world, having won the 1954 FIFA World Cup. England won further friendlies against West Germany in 1956 and 1965.
1966–1969: 1966 FIFA World Cup
England and West Germany met at Wembley again on 23 February 1966, as part of their preparations for the 1966 FIFA World Cup, which was to be held in England. England again won 1–0, with a goal from Nobby Stiles, and the match also saw the first appearance for England of West Ham United striker Geoff Hurst.Both countries had a successful World Cup in 1966, and met in the final played at Wembley on Saturday, 30 July 1966. This was and still is regarded by many as the most important match ever played between the two teams, and it was also the first time they had ever met in a competitive game, as opposed to the friendly matches they had played before. It was also a highly eventful and in some respects controversial game, which created the modern rivalry between the teams.
England led 2–1 until the very end of normal time, when a West German goal levelled the scores and took the match into extra time. In the first period of extra time, England striker Geoff Hurst had a shot on goal which bounced down from the crossbar and then out of the goal, before being cleared away by the West German defenders. The England players celebrated a goal, but the referee was unsure as to whether or not the ball had crossed the line when it hit the ground. After consulting with a linesman, Tofiq Bahramov, the referee awarded a goal to England. Bahramov, from the Soviet Union, became famous and celebrated in English popular culture as "the Russian linesman", although he was actually from Azerbaijan. When England played the Azerbaijan national team in a World Cup qualifier in October 2004—in a stadium named after Bahramov—many England fans travelling to the game asked to be shown the grave of the official, who had died in 1993, so that they could place flowers on it, and before the game a ceremony honouring him was attended by Hurst and other footballing celebrities.
West Germany, however, did not believe that the ball had crossed the line, with commentators such as Robert Becker of Kicker magazine accusing the linesman of bias because the West German team had eliminated the USSR in the semi-final. Modern studies using film analysis and computer simulation have suggested the ball never crossed the line – both Duncan Gillies of the Visual Information Processing Group at Imperial College London and Ian Reid and Andrew Zisserman of the Department of Engineering Science at University of Oxford agree that the ball would have needed to travel a further 2.5–6 cm to fully cross the line, and that therefore this was not a fair goal. In West Germany, it led to the creation of the expression "Wembley-Tor", or "Wembley-Goal", a phrase used to describe any goal scored in a similar fashion to Hurst's.
England, however, scored another controversial goal at the end of extra time, winning 4–2. This goal came after fans began to spill onto the field, thinking the game was over, which should have stopped play. The goal, a third for Hurst, was described by BBC Television commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme in a now-famous piece of commentary, "They think it's all over... it is now!", referring to the English fans who had spilled onto the field. The expression has become a celebrated part of English popular culture, indelibly linked with the game in the minds of the English public.
The 1966 final's influence on the culture surrounding the England team would not end there, however. Despite playing on their home soil, England wore their away kit of red shirts, white shorts and red socks, and since then England fans have had a special affinity for their team's away kit, with retro 1966 shirts selling well in recent years.
The game is often held as having been the height of English sporting achievement, it has also created some favourable legacies; a common chant among England supporters at Germany games is "Two World Wars and One World Cup" to the tune of "Camptown Races".
Two years after the World Cup, on 1 June 1968, the two teams met again in another friendly match, this time in West Germany, in which the West Germans won their first victory over an English team, 38 years after they had first played. The scoreline was 1–0, Franz Beckenbauer scoring for West Germany, but as Hugh McIlvanney wrote in his match report for The Observer: "Comparing this miserable hour and a half with the last great meeting between the countries is entirely fatuous. But that will not prevent the West Germans from doing it. Their celebrations will not be inhibited by the knowledge that today's losers were almost a reserve team, and even the agonies of boredom they shared with us will now seem worthwhile. They have beaten England, and that is enough."