“WHO ARE YA?”: A WORLD CUP IDENTITY

There is a question that has echoed through English stadiums for generations, shouted from the stands even before the match begins: “Who are ya?” Who are you? 

It is a fan-driven provocation, of course, but during this World Cup it has also become the title of a deeper national reflection. Ian McKellen and the playwright James Graham — who previously wrote *Dear England*, the theatrical portrait of the Gareth Southgate era — have made a short film, *Love Letter to England*, which attempts to answer that question. The film stems from a wider initiative, the “National Conversation”, which gathers testimonies from ordinary citizens on what still unites a country riven by social and political divisions.

The phrase that gives its title to The Guardian’s article on this project — the idea that the bonds holding us together are fraying — strikes me as the perfect starting point for discussing an identity that Italian-Britons experience every day… Because whilst England grapples with what it means to be English at a time of collective uncertainty, those who have immigrated and navigate between two countries, two languages and two ways of experiencing – even – football, find themselves grappling with that question in a twofold, and in some ways more intimate, way.

One match and supporting two teams: how is that possible? 

Being Italian-British during a World Cup isn’t simply a matter of supporting two teams – even though Italy didn’t qualify this time – It is about inhabiting two different emotional frameworks. English football – the kind Southgate spoke to his players about even before results mattered – “what England means, what it means to play for her” – is a game desperately seeking a shared narrative in which to recognise itself, after years of Brexit, polarisation, and communities that seem to be communicating less and less with one another. 

Italian football, by contrast, has a more visceral relationship with national identity, one that is almost taken for granted until it is called into question — and when it is called into question, as happened during the years when the team failed to qualify, the sporting crisis immediately becomes a crisis of collective identity.

Those who live between these two worlds soon learn that identity is not a fixed given, but something that is constantly negotiated. You are not ‘half and half’, as is often said rather blandly; you are ‘whole’ in two different worlds, depending on the context, the language you are speaking, and the match you are watching. 

During the World Cup, this duality becomes more apparent, and you can easily find yourself cheering for an English goal. 

The cost of authenticity: switching between different cultural identities 

Cultural psychology has a name for this mechanism: it calls it ‘frame-switching’ – the ability to activate a whole repertoire of values, memories and emotional reactions depending on which cultural identity is triggered by a context, a sound, or even a hymn. It is not a matter of playing two different roles, but of genuinely possessing two frames of reference and knowing, almost without thinking, which one to activate at the right moment. 

This can certainly create an identity conflict, as the constant switching demands considerable cognitive resources. For some, it can lead to feelings of contradiction, increased stress or a decline in well-being, if one’s inner values are constantly being renegotiated.

Those with an integrated bicultural identity — that is, those who have managed to reconcile their two identities without perceiving them as conflicting — do not experience this transition as a rupture, but as an expansion: more emotional languages at their disposal, not a loyalty split in two. It is when the two identities are perceived as incompatible, however, that unease arises: the feeling of having to choose a side, the feeling of betraying the other every time one cheers for just one team. 

A deep sense of belonging

Football, with its urgent need for tribal belonging, is a perfect test of this inner balance: it puts to the test, ninety minutes at a time, just how authorised one truly feels…

Italian-British identity is not the difference between two partial identities, but the realisation that one can be fully Italian and fully British in the same body, on the same afternoon, in front of the same screen.

In this respect, football serves a purpose that goes beyond sport: it is one of the few languages still capable of allowing multiple identities to coexist without forcing them to make a definitive choice. A World Cup does not ask anyone to choose once and for all who they are. It simply asks, for ninety minutes at a time, that we feel part of something — whether it’s the chanting in the stands at Wembley or that under a beach umbrella in Ostia. And perhaps the real answer to the question ‘who are you?’ is not the name of a country, but the ability to remain true to both the stories we carry within us, even when the threads that bind us seem to be growing thinner.