When England fans grin and beer it

It’s not whether you win or lose, but the spirit of the game that matters. That is what England’s beer industry must have been counting on, given that the Beautiful Game also prompteda sideshow: pint-throwing.

The average football fan of this World Cup’s fourth-best footballing side can only quaff so much before getting drunk.

But there is no real limit to how much he can waste by chucking beer into the air after a goal, the last such occasion arising in the fifth-minute goal by Kieran Trippier against Croatia in the semi-final England lost.


Venting pint-up feelings is all very well, but the team has to play ball too.

So, England’s 2-0 win against Sweden in the quarter-final portended well for beer purveyors, with fans across England apparently pitching an estimated 100,000 pints (50,000 litres) of beer into the air for the two goals, even as they drank about 38 million pints. But now that the World Cup offers no compelling pint-chucking action any more for the English — at least, for the next four years — the industry will look to club football for a boost for this latest English amateur sport.

At least this one sport-related wastage is relatively more eco-friendly, as long as plastic beer cups land in bins afterwards, of course.