So, the time has come to kill the economy of hope. Not hope itself. The industry built around it. Every two years, England demonstrates the business model. Take a talented team, add encouraging performances, a young star and a manager suddenly expected to do rather more than pick eleven footballers, find the lost grail of DNA at St George’s Park: repair the national psyche.
Tills ring, beer mountains rise, and influencers discover the low block. Former players explain why this time is different. Hope sells shirts, subscriptions, clicks and dreams. Who wants to short it?
But the product is becoming toxic. England already performs above its weight: reaching the latter stages is elite achievement, often settled by a deflection or twelve yards. Yet inflated expectations make a semi-final feel like failure when it once merited an open-top bus.
We have turned hope into emotional debt. Expectation is hope with a mortgage, and reality always sends the bailiffs.
Then the capital moves. Before Andy Burnham has found the Downing Street kettle, the King of the North is being floated as a national defibrillator. Britain is investing in renewal, rescue and redemption before the first hard decision. Labour has found its own “It’s Coming Home”.
This is not an attack on Burnham or England. It is about what we do to people when we need them to save us: build the fantasy, place a human being inside it, then punish them for failing to resemble the packaging.
I have spent four decades watching belief being made, managed and monetised. The problem is not that the machinery has stopped working. It is that it works too well. Social media turns possibility into prophecy, belief into entitlement and disappointment into betrayal before the first espresso.
The economy of hope privatises the profit and nationalises the heartbreak.
It is time to kill it.
That does not mean embracing pessimism or managed decline. Reality need not be vanilla. But it is far harder to sell than hype.
Reality has no anthem, rarely trends and guarantees no happy ending. It asks communicators to explain odds, trade-offs and time; leaders to admit what they cannot control; brands to resist false certainty; and audiences to accept being treated as adults.
Our task is to package reality with enough imagination, humanity and courage to compete with fantasy. Make honesty inspiring. Make progress visible. Build expectations that survive contact with events. Let leaders be mortal without presenting every imperfection as betrayal.
PR spent a century learning how to make fantasy believable. Its next great test is making reality compelling.
Hope should emerge from trust; it should not be manufactured as bait. When every tournament becomes a coronation and every new leader a messiah, we do not strengthen belief. We exhaust our capacity for it.
It is time to kill the economy of hope before it kills hope itself.
