Sixty Years of Hurt Sets Out to Decode England Through Football

Image: Steve Best Xavicus Media via BBC Press

By Jon Donnis

The England men’s football team has always carried more than the weight of results. It drags behind it something heavier and harder to define, a sense that every pass, every missed chance, every flicker of brilliance reflects the country itself. Triumphs feel like national release. Failures linger like collective memory. It is never just a game, not really.

That idea sits at the centre of Sixty Years of Hurt, a new series hosted by David Baddiel for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. Framed as part of The History Podcast, the series looks at England’s football story as something broader than sport, a cultural thread running through decades of social change, tension and identity.

Baddiel approaches the subject from a personal angle that mirrors the complexity he is trying to unpack. Born in America, with a Welsh father and a mother who fled Nazi Germany, he still found himself drawn into supporting England. That contradiction becomes a starting point rather than a footnote. His aim is not just to revisit famous matches or painful defeats, but to understand why the connection between team and nation runs so deep.

Across the series, he traces a line from the euphoria of 1966 through the near misses of 1996 and into the present day, speaking to those who experienced it from every angle. Voices such as Stephen Fry, Stuart Pearce and David Seaman sit alongside writers, comedians and cultural commentators, each offering a different lens on what the England team has meant at various moments in time.

The result is less a straightforward sports retrospective and more a study of how national myths are built and reshaped. The shirt with three lions becomes a symbol that absorbs ideas about class, race, expectation and belonging. The players may change, the managers come and go, but the emotional pattern remains familiar. Hope rises, reality intervenes, and the cycle begins again.

Behind the scenes, the series is produced by BBC Studios Audio in collaboration with Left Bank Pictures, the team also working on Dear England for BBC television. That connection underlines how this story continues to evolve across different formats, each trying to capture something that feels both deeply personal and widely shared.

There is a sense that the timing matters. With another World Cup approaching, attention naturally returns to the national side, along with the familiar mixture of optimism and doubt. Sixty Years of Hurt leans into that mood, offering something more reflective than the usual build up. It asks what England sees when it looks at its team, and whether that reflection has changed at all.

The series begins on 16 May, airing weekly at 10:00am. It arrives not as a celebration or a post mortem, but as an attempt to understand why, after decades of frustration and fleeting joy, the connection still holds.