If the most ubiquitous piece of UEFA branding here at the Euros is to be believed, everyone is ‘united by football.’ 

The message is plastered on A-boards and team buses the length and breadth of the tournament. Everything, from the city of Dusseldorf to the Netherlands team are sharing in the union.

The shiny blue livery cannot disguise the inconvenient truth that neither this country, nor this continent, feels like a place of such kinship, though. Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland are appropriating the German flag in a way which makes many fans reluctant to display it at all. 

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR) party, a repurposed National Front, are looking for a parliamentary majority at the snap French elections which will take place around the quarter-final stages of the tournament. 

The far right is already politically established in the Netherlands. It’s the same political backdrop in Austria, Belgium and Slovakia, who are all competing here.

Kylian Mbappe is waging war with French extremists rather than turning a blind eye

Given that conservative elements in France share the same revulsion for young players expressing a political view as some within our own shores, you imagined that Kylian Mbappe, megastar and walking brand, would have cited tournament preparations as a reason to keep out of the politics. But he wasn’t willing to do that. 

When Marcus Thuram - whose father, Lilian, publicly picked apart the xenophobic, antisemitic nationalism espoused by Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie in 2006 – this week urged his compatriots and team-mates to turn out, vote and shut out the far right in France, Mbappe was right on his shoulder.

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Kylian Mbappe makes plea to French citizens to vote in snap elections on the eve of Euro 2024 opener

‘We see today that the extremists are at the gates of power,’ Mbappe said, the following day. ‘I think all of us here are aware of that but maybe there are young people out there who aren’t. We have the opportunity to choose the future of our country.’

These interventions are complicated and require nuance. Mbappe’s observations about the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old shot dead during a police road check in Nanterre last July, later needed to be tempered by a broader plea for peace, when the incident provoked riots. 

That appeal was issued by the French squad collectively. This time, Mbappe, unlike Thuram, has not specifically named the political party he abhors, though it is patently obvious.

Entering the maelstrom can divide, not unite, and in Mbappe’s case it has left some of a conservative disposition asking precisely what right a 25-year-old multi-millionaire has to moralise about how who represents them. 

The attacks from a flank desperately searching for evidence of hypocrisy, have reached Mbappe from across Europe. 

‘All the people who think Mbappe's statement is so fantastic (and especially the many politicians who piggyback): that player is employed by Qatar, you know,’ said Dutch commentator Weird Duk, who has quite a following, perhaps because of that name.

It’s not just the politically exercised who are feeling this way. I canvassed the opinions of French supporters about Mbappe’s intervention here in Dusseldorf on Tuesday. Six were for him; four were not. Broadly speaking, the older ones said, ‘keep out of it.’

This is why the notion of an England footballer publicly aiming to get the vote out or express an opinion on, say, the Reform Party are more unthinkable than ever. 

Things seemed to have changed since the 2016 Euros, when the Brexit vote was cast and Harry Kane was quizzed about the outcome. ('I don't think that any of us know too much about it to comment on it, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens,' he replied.) 

Briefly, Raheem Sterling demonstrated that players could have an opinion and exercise it, though others do not seem to have taken up that torch. Entirely their prerogative. It’s a personal choice. The divisions and heat created by players taking the knee hasn’t helped.

Mbappe frankly couldn’t care less if Le Pen’s foot soldiers decide they’re coming for him and there’s something hugely uplifting about that, because France, like Germany, finds itself in a terribly dark political place – obsessing over immigration and race and staring into a bleak future of NR power.

Should the party prevail in France’s election, Mbappe and his team-mates could witness Marine Le Pen’s anointed prime minister - a 28-year-old who advocates making it easier to expel ‘Islamic foreigners’ and the abolition of French nationality for those not born in the country – looking on from the stands if they reach the final in Berlin. Echoes, there, of the 1936 Olympics in the very same city.

The France team’s modern history tells us that the collective fight for a more united, multicultural kind of nationhood can create an incredible football force. 

The 1998 World Cup was, of course, lifted on home soil by France’s ‘black, blanc, beur’ (‘black, white, Arab’) team led by Zinedine Zidane, a captain of Algerian descent. 

Le Pen sr despised that French team – whose players of foreign descent included Thuram, Marcel Desailly and Christian Karembeu – and called it an 'artificial' one.

A threshold seemed to have been cleared that summer but Mbappe, the son of a Cameroonian father and an Algerian Kabyle mother, finds himself waging the same battle at Thuram son’s shoulder. 

‘There is a situation that is even more important than the game,’ he said. ‘I want to be proud to represent France. I don't want to represent a country that doesn't correspond to my values or our values.’ 

Leadership we had never seen in this most remarkable player. Leadership transcending football. All power to him.

I saw myself in Namibian's self-dismissal

I accumulated runs at such a laborious rate for a Chirk, my North Wales village team, in the 1980s that our captain, standing on the boundary rope, would employ a system of signals instructing me to get on with it. 

I’d been entirely unacquainted until last week with the notion of self-dismissal called ‘retired out’ – just walking off the pitch to give someone else a go. 

Namibia opener Nikolaas Davin used it to get shut of himself, so David Wiese could get in and have a swing against England. 

Not entirely in the spirit of the game I would venture say, and fortunately not a part of the sport’s lexicon in the 1980s, because with a strategy like that I would have been taking a walk to the boundary every week.

Jude's self-belief shows he will excel

The big moments, Michael Owen once told me, in a discussion of his devastating display against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup, are about self-belief. Not worrying. 

‘It’s like that when you’re young because don’t think it through too much.’ 

He was 18 that summer and instinctively knew he was going to excel. Jude Bellingham has that same unencumbered way about him. And so does Cole Palmer. 

Amid all he ifs, buts and maybes about the laborious events of Sunday night and how to set up England, isn’t ‘play Palmer’ the most obvious answer? And an absolute requisite?

Football is the universal language 

In despatches from home, my wife describes a friend, recently arrived in the UK and with little English, bringing his family to meet ours last weekend. 

With no need for words, his 10-year old and our grandson started kicking a football around together and continued to do so very happily for the next hour. 

The universal language of football at its best, forging a connection across irrelevant barriers to create a new friendship.