Culture

Iceland Just Knocked England Out Of The Euro Soccer Championship, Which Is Kind Of Appropriate

England is having a bad week, huh.

by Alex McKinnon  28 June 2016

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It’s fair to say that England isn’t having its best week right now. They voted to exit the European Union before almost immediately coming to profoundly regret that decision, their Prime Minister has resigned, their main opposition party is tearing itself to pieces, the pound is in freefall and their northern neighbour Scotland is openly thinking about abandoning the United Kingdom altogether.

Put it this way: England needed a win. And what better place to get one, under normal circumstances, than the UEFA European Championship, one of the world’s most competitive and prestigious international soccer tournaments. After the English national rugby team humiliated Australia three times running in recent weeks, surely England’s soccer team could knock over puny old Iceland and advance to the UEFA quarter-finals.

Well, no, as turns out. Not at all.

If an upset soccer scoreline doesn’t mean much to you, consider this: Iceland is a country of just 332,000 people, which makes it substantially smaller than Canberra. It’s so tiny that a couple of Icelanders had to set up a custom dating app to help locals avoid accidentally committing incest. One in every 1,000 Icelandic men aged between 20 and 30 are in the national soccer team. Iceland’s coach, Heimer Hallgrimsson, works as a dentist when he’s not coaching to make ends meet. The recent Icelandic elections had a record low turnout because an estimated ten percent of the entire country were in France watching them take on England.

England, by contrast, boasts some of the highest-paid players in the world, and fields a team estimated to be worth about 334 million Euros. England manager Roy Hodgson alone earns 3.5 million pounds a year — at least he did, until his obscenely wealthy side was beaten hands-down by the European soccer equivalent of the Jamaican bobsled team from Cool Runnings.

Iceland were already the tournament’s crowd favourite after unexpectedly beating Austria earlier this week, inadvertently bringing Gudmundur Benediktsson, their deliriously excited and high-pitched official commentator, to the world’s delighted attention.

But beating England is taking it to another level. Even Iceland’s post-game celebration is going viral.

All in all, England is having an extremely shitty week. Buck up, chums.