This was particularly true in Wales. Here, the Leave vote was strongest in post-industrial communities that successive governments in London and Cardiff had failed. These areas had benefited from EU investment, but it had done little to alleviate the corrosive social, cultural and economic effects of the decline of the coal industry.

In the 19th century, coal made modern Wales. It created a modern economy and a population boom, transforming rural communities into vibrant, industrial towns, each with a fierce sense of pride in themselves, their class and Wales itself. They were British places too: proud of their King, Country and Empire, proud that so many Royal Navy ships ran on Welsh coal.

In 1920, the number of miners in Wales stood at 290,000. Lured by cheaper production abroad, however, the United Kingdom they helped build turned its back on the Welsh coalfields, and decades of decline followed. The depression of the interwar years was devastating and led to mass unemployment and migration. The nationalisation of the industry in 1947 gave the miners some respect back, but it could not stop the decline of an industry gradually being replaced by oil. Between 1948 and 1970, the number of Welsh miners fell from 128,000 to 50,000. In 1974, a memo from Mid Glamorgan County Council to the Secretary of State for Wales said bluntly: “The Valleys are dying.”

As colliery after colliery closed, a slow-burning sense of anger started to grip communities that rightly felt forgotten and neglected. And as the industry that created them disappeared, many places worried they had no future. When Thatcherism arrived and finished the coal industry off, this anger intensified. Whereas previous governments had at least tried to manage the change, Thatcher seemed to relish hammering communities already on their knees.

The Brexit vote in post-industrial Wales owed much to this history. Voters there were disillusioned and looking for the better future so long denied to them. And that is what they were promised. They were sold a vision of a world where Wales and Britain had dignity and self-respect again, a world where there was a better economy and more money for the NHS. They were sold scapegoats for their ills: red tape and bureaucrats, immigrants and foreigners.

Three years on, the promises have not come true. Across the UK, the NHS has got worse, public services are on the brink, and inflation is fuelling a cost-of-living crisis. But in Wales, equally important — but less obvious — has been the way Brexit has distracted voters from the problems of devolved government. Particularly when it comes to discussions around the nation’s failing NHS, Welsh Labour must surely be thankful that voters’ eyes have focused on Westminster and Europe. And when attention does turn to their record, Welsh Labour points, not entirely unreasonably, to the lack of funding it receives from the UK government. Indeed, because so many Welsh Labour voters supported leaving the EU, it suits Wales’s strongly pro-EU government to blame Westminster rather than Brexit for its litany problems.

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Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Brexit also failed because of its Anglo-centricity. In their arguments, its prime movers and shakers paid little attention to the parts of the UK that are not England. It does not seem to have occurred to most of them to consider what might happen to the UK’s land border with the EU and how Brexit would intersect with the Good Friday Agreement. Brexiteers outside England should have known better, but they too seemed too distracted by ideological dreams to think much about the practicalities. The result was political turmoil and the effective end of the UK’s own single market.

In Wales, this gave a shot in the arm to those who seek independence. This may remain a minority cause, but Brexit showed that radical political change can happen. For many Remainers, Brexit has destroyed the liberal European United Kingdom they felt attached to; for some, independence offers an appealing route back to more tolerant politics. Meanwhile, for many Leavers, the failures of Brexit is yet another case of London politicians letting them down. For those who haven’t given up on politicians entirely, independence can feel the only hope they have left. Some feel they have little to lose.

For a while, Yes Cymru, the focal point of the independence movement, rode on the coattails of the disillusionment of Leavers and Remainers. But it has ridden into its own problems. A group of socially-conservative members became alarmed at Yes Cymru’s adoption of what they saw as socialist causes and they staged something resembling a progressive coup. In doing so, they destroyed the group’s momentum. Like Brexit, the cause of Welsh independence has been undermined by lack of consensus over what it is actually for.

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Nonetheless, now Brexit has put independence on the table of mainstream debate, it is unlikely to go away. In these debates, the mistakes of Brexit ought to be a cautionary tale. Those who seek Welsh or Scottish independence must learn that people’s fears about the practicalities of major constitutional change should be addressed, not dismissed as nit-picking or a “Project Fear”. They should see that winning a referendum has to be a beginning, not an end. And they should understand that sovereignty alone achieves little unless the power of the state is harnessed to direct and temper the markets.

Away from the ideological and political games, many people’s lives in Wales continue to worsen, and the economic pain is deepest in the very same marginalised communities — particularly in the southern coalfields — whose support enabled Brexit in the first place. According to UnHerd’s polling, the majority there now seem to regret Brexit. In 2016, Blanau Gwent was the region’s capital of Brexit, with 62% voting to leave the EU. Today, only a third don’t think it was a mistake.

Yet this whole sorry affair is further fuelling what made them vote for it: a sense of anger at being let down by mainstream politics. And they are right to be angry. For decades, post-coal Wales has been let down by Left and Right. Successive governments have spoken warm words about regional policy and levelling up. At times, significant money followed those words. But it was never enough and far too often it was spent on things rather than people. It did nothing to address how free markets could not undo the damage free markets had done.

There are no easy answers to the problems of the UK’s post-industrial communities. Some Brexiteers did at least recognise that the UK needs radical change, but that change is yet to appear. In Wales, it is little wonder that people regret; there is much to regret.

Every football fan grew up watching the World Cup, but for most in Wales it was always someone else’s party. We’d come to expect disappointment. It wouldn’t have been so bad had we not had to watch the world’s biggest sporting competition through a UK-media that assumed every viewer was an England fan. To make things worse, we were always subject to a barrage of “Come on England” advertising in shops and on television. During the 1998 tournament, I wrote to my local supermarket in Cardiff to complain it was full of England flags. They replied, with more than a touch of sarcasm, that they’d get behind Wales if we ever qualified. Well, now we have — and tonight are taking on the English team we were tacitly expected to support.

The current buzz around football in Wales represents more than just matters on the field. Unlike other Welsh national institutions, the Football Association of Wales (FAW) has been unashamedly political in recent years. Players have received lessons on Welsh history and official social media has marked important anniversaries. The official Welsh World Cup song is “Yma o Hyd”, an Eighties anthem that proudly declares that the Welsh are still here, “despite everyone and everything”, despite Thatcher and her “crew”. It was written and sung by Dafydd Iwan, a former president of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, who was imprisoned several times during the Sixties and Seventies civil disobedience campaign for the Welsh-language rights. The FAW’s video for the song includes footage of those protests, and iconic moments from Welsh history such as the 1984-5 miners’ strike and the flooding of the Tryweryn valley in the Sixties to build a reservoir for Liverpool. And the interweaving of historical archive with contemporary scenes of flag-waving fans resembles a video by the campaign for Welsh independence. Whereas once this would have been controversial, it has been embraced by most fans regardless of their politics and language.

The Welsh language has been central to Welsh identity and the historic Welsh independence movement. Welsh has been used and respected by the FAW, not just in a symbolic way but in interviews and press conferences, showing the world and the Welsh people that it is a living language. For more than a century, parts of the Welsh population had a schizophrenic relationship with Welsh. They were proud that it existed but also prone to think that it had no practical use, that it was a language of the past, not the present or the future. The FAW have challenged that view, helping normalise the language by using it where English might have been easier and more widely understood. The last line of the national anthem translates as “May the old language endure”. In the FAW’s actions, there is hope this can become reality.

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But football can also give a misleading picture of modern Wales. The Welsh language is only spoken by around a fifth of the population. Its future in its rural heartlands is endangered as young Welsh speakers move away in search of jobs and affordable houses and their place is taken by older English migrants. In urban areas, the language is undergoing something of a revival as more and more parents choose to send their children to Welsh-medium schools, but that can make those children think of the language as something educational and consequently uncool. The playgrounds of those schools are dominated by the English language. Too often their pupils make little of Welsh after they leave.

The particularly assertive and self-confident sense of nationhood that is depicted around football is also misleading. Support for Welsh independence has risen dramatically since Brexit but it remains no higher than maybe a quarter of the electorate. The emotional Britishness that held the union together is fading with generational change, but the old ideas that Wales is too small and too poor to be independent remain very powerful. Migration from England has changed the dynamics of Welsh society. In the 2011 census only 66% of the population recorded their national identity as Welsh. In a recent YouGov poll, 17% of respondents in Wales said they would be supporting England at the World Cup. The proud Welshness so evident in football is not shared by the whole population.

Yet sport has been fundamental to why Welsh identity has survived in the modern period. Through the historical accident of the two sports being invented in the UK, Wales had its own national teams in football and rugby. In the face of internal political and linguistic divisions, these teams provided an emotional symbol to unite behind. It allowed both migrants and the different forms of Welshness to come together and reminded the Welsh, and the wider world, that Wales was a nation. In the face of the immense cultural and political shadow of England and the absence of any real political self-government before 1999 this mattered. The historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that the “imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people”. In Wales, there has been little else that has done this.

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Since the advent of devolution, sport should matter less. The actual devolution referendum in 1997 was won with a majority of less than 7,000 and just a quarter of the total electorate voted in favour. But today it is only a fringe that wants rid of the Senedd (the Welsh Parliament). As political scientists say, devolution has become the settled will of the Welsh people. As is so clear in football, the Welsh have become more comfortable being Welsh. But devolution has in many ways been a disappointment. There are fine words about inclusivity, environmentalism and economic regeneration but little real action. A third of Welsh children grow up in poverty. Waiting times for NHS treatment are much longer in Wales than England.

Yet the Welsh Labour Government gets an easy ride. The Conservative opposition suffers from remarkably poor leadership and has yet to find the distinctive Welsh voice it needs if it is ever to make significant electoral gains. The nationalist opposition is not really an opposition at all. It has an agreement of cooperation with Labour and is often reluctant to criticise anything the Welsh government does, seemingly for fear of being seen to criticise the very concept of devolution. The London media is not interested in Welsh politics, while the Welsh media is too small to offer substantive criticism. The result is that, after 23 years in power, Welsh Labour are secure, complacent and perhaps even arrogant. They made a song and dance about managing Covid in their own way and yet they refuse to hold a Welsh inquiry into what happened.

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Wales’s smallness contributes to this. Everyone in Welsh public life seems to know each other. In the media, academia and the voluntary sector, the networks that give people access to funding and power are too small to risk rocking the boat. Rather than criticise, it is often easier to celebrate, and the Welsh media’s upbeat treatment of the World Cup is evidence of this. There has generally been less discussion of the politics of Qatar than in the London media. The Welsh Government has a presence at the tournament and put chasing investment and tourism opportunities before its stated principles of equality and diversity. Yet it has not had substantive criticism for this. Even complaints about the tactics and squad selection were responded to angrily by some fans, who seemed to think it was unpatriotic or ungrateful. In Wales, we too often just seem happy to have qualified. We have waited too long for this for politics to get in the way.

But we shouldn’t just be happy to be there. Our game has matured enough that we should be debating team selections and tactics. Likewise, we shouldn’t just be content that, after centuries of governance from Westminster, we now have our own Senedd. We need to be critical of our institutions and our government. We need to move beyond celebrating the fact that Wales and Welshness are still here and start asking where we are going next. Football shows how deeply many care about Wales, but that passion and patriotism has yet to be put to full use.