We won’t understand the scale of the disaster until next summer. That’s when 16 European nations will compete for the European Championship in Austria and Switzerland – and England won’t be one of them. All Europe will party. Except us. All Europe will cheer and groan and blame the manager and hide behind the sofa at the penalty shoot-outs. But we won’t be there: we’ll be moping about at home.

Something special happens – or normally happens – every two years. England compete in a football tournament; and at first, the country is divided. Half the people think it’s great, and the other half vow to have nothing to do with it. Then, match by match, the second half of the population gets sucked in. Four years ago, no one outside football had heard of Wayne Rooney. After two matches in the European Championship of 2004, he was a national treasure. It is the glorious unifying effect of a major football tournament that we shall miss next summer: those occasions when ten million households make the tea at half-time and everybody says it’s unbelievably wonderful, or unbelievably dreadful. Sense of proportion is one of the things you check in at the door when you enter the mansion of sport. That, in a way, is the point. Sport gives you a dozen kinds of agony and ecstasy.

That period of shared national madness is something to treasure – and it’s been lost. Of course, committed football people – those who know about 4-4-2 and offside – will cheer for their clubs, and look to a success in Europe.

It’s not the same, though. The country doesn’t unite behind Manchester United or Arsenal, even if the quality of club football is better. Manchester United would probably beat England, but that’s not the point. When it’s England, nobody minds about the quality. It’s about unity. It’s great precisely because it is a shared experience.

Expert View

The faults that lie deep within the nation's football will not be cured simply by handing Steve McClaren his P45

Martin Samuel

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Background

• O’Neill rules himself out of running

• Same old routine for Barwick and Co

• £2.5m for worst English manager

• English game paralysed by fear of the unknown

Background

• The contenders

• Defeat puts paid to hopes of £2bn bonanza

• McClaren's epitaph: ‘Worse than Graham Taylor’

• Former coach faces fight to rebuild reputation

Background

• From 1 to 11: why number was up for England

• Beckham is the blueprint by which to rebuild national game

• Talisman expects backlash but is not retiring

• Carson hoping to bounce back

Background

• Wembley authorities unable to explain quagmire

• England were a shower but I’d do it all again

• Time to support the other red and whites

• England got what they deserved, says Corluka

Background

• England among also-rans in World Cup seedings

• Players’ egos responsible for failure, says Keane

• Own Goal

Multimedia

• Vote for the next England manager

• England's ten lowest moments ever

• England fans: let off steam here

The national pride thing matters. After the departure of Sven-Göran Eriksson, a Swede, as head coach of the England team, there was a yearning for a real Englishman to run things. Alas, with an Englishman, Steve McClaren, in charge, England haven’t even got to the tournament and he has now been sacked. Who shall we find to relaunch a team shattered by disorganisation and disappointment? The unacceptable fact is that the best manager that England could produce made the most almighty cockup of the job, and there is no obvious Englishman to do the job better. Some see this as a matter for shame, but it is also a thing to glory in. English football is no longer English. It is deeply and profoundly cosmopolitan. English football is all about the increasingly permeable nature of national frontiers and cultural boundaries.

England’s failure has been put down to the fact that so many players at England’s leading big clubs are not English. It seems that the nature, not just of English football, but of Englishness itself, is being redefined. The fans sing “I’m England till I die”, but England is changing and football is the most obvious symptom of that change.

Multifaith, multicultural, multicoloured, multilingual England: the times they are a-changing, because that’s what times do. The failure of the England team is part of a larger pattern, one in which the whole business of nationality gets more fuzzy every year and England no longer means the things that it once did. All change comes at a cost, and perhaps one of those costs is the effectiveness of the England football team – and with it, the sad loss of those biennial, heady, foolish, glorious weeks of unity.

View from the fans

Here is a selection of the postings yesterday on Times Online:

McClaren should never have been appointed in the first place, he was not up to the job! The players generally did not perform and you have to say that if Alex Ferguson or [Arsene] Wenger had been in charge those players would have won

Peter Bolton

Get a serious coach! who is McClaren? how did you expect to win anything with this guy?

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As for the players, why is it that a poorly paid bunch of Croatians play with so much heart and passion for their country? Because they know what it is to struggle, and to pull together when it gets tough

David Thorne

Frankly the only qualification you need to be an England manager is to be able to write 4-4-2 on a team sheet

Richard

Croatia reminded us what football is all about and if the England squad showed 1 per cent of the pride in the white shirt they pull on that Croatia showed last night they’d have pulled an undeserved result out the bag. Everything about the FA is moribund, everything about English football is parochial and if we want our footballing heritage to survive the whole of English football needs to be replaced from top to bottom

Andy Deakin