I think if you’re in an England-based forum and are constantly talking about how badly you want the England football team to fail, talk up a 0-0 as the greatest result of your team in decades purely because it came against them, performatively buy the shirt of whoever they’re playing etc, eventually somebody is going to say ‘hey, fuck you’. It may come from a place you feel is perfectly justified - the media saturation, dickheads on twitter, the cooption of the game by a nationalistic, xenophobic government, centuries of shared history and colonial tyranny - but ultimately you have to know the people you are with are only human and what you’re doing is needling them.
It’s the old football thread story of where does banter end and abuse begin, heightened by national sentiment being woven into it. Unfortunately everyone has a different level of tolerance to it, and that makes it unfeasible to police. I think the general tone of these threads is good, and I think it’s healthy and funny for England supporters to be aware that pretty much the rest of the continent loathes us for fairly good reasons. Just try and be aware that this is not the running sewer of social media, it’s a forum of friends, and nobody’s going to benefit if it breaks down into acrimony because you had to offload your psychic grievance with the media and an overweight skinhead in the street here.
