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| In a nutshell |
I’ve fucking loved this Euros. Well, I did until the inevitable penalty failings and the unedifying events surrounding the final. Being totally objective and forgetting the wider context, the final was a brilliantly tense game, a suitably wrought occasion that put the icing on the cake of some fantastic football in the lead up.
It would be easy to say ‘that’s cos England did well’ but I really enjoyed the last one where Norn Iron and Wales were decent as well. I probably enjoyed the one before that and the one before that and I definitely enjoyed the one where England didn’t make it and I seem to recall enjoying the ones where they were really shite pretty much as much as the ones where it looked like they finally might not be shite for a bit until they were.
I can’t really remember details. I’m getting older and my memories are less crisp about stuff that happened in the gap between a) my childhood and b) now. Once I believed I’d remember everything about every football match forever and ever and ever, now they turn into a blur of memories, things a decade apart mashed together into a Frankenstein’s monster of a tournament in my head. Anyhow, this one. I can still largely remember the last few weeks I think.
What I want to write about is the way, me, a football cynic, a miserablist, a joyless voice forever complaining about 'this' and 'that' and 'the other' - someone who could be accused of writing lyrical hyperbole along the lines of "football is a washed up corpse drowned in the sea of small minded corporate ambition" has found this tournament fabulous.
I then want to move onto complaining a bit. Of course I do....
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| Remember when Owen Hargreaves popped up and everyone was like 'Who the fuck is Owen Hargreaves?' |
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First: Sunshine.
I approached the new format with caution, but overall, I thought it worked. Although some would argue the initial group stages lacked drama, there was enough tension in some of the final round of group games to make up for the ones where there wasn’t much at all. The format also gave everyone a chance to ease into it, for us to get to know the teams a bit before writing them off or hyping them up. I quite liked it. It was comfortably bloated, like the feeling after a one off slap up meal, rather than the horrible weight of long term obesity.
It seemed that almost every game I watched had something. The final might be between two ‘giants’ of the game (albeit one that didn’t make the last World Cup and another who hasn’t made a final in 55 years) but there were plenty of plucky underdog stories and therefore some notable bloody noses for teams amongst the favourites. You could make an argument that an ideal tournament is one where good teams get to the end, but along the way, it looks like they might not. That's kind of how this one has worked.
Highlights included: The Swiss being surprisingly watchable and aggressive in their intent. Hungary briefly flickering back into life on the world stage after being awful for about 7 decades in a row, nearly beating Germany despite being to all intents and purposes a division 3 team with a big lump up front. The first set of quarter finals were possibly the best set of back to back games at any tournament ever. Italy captivated me from the off, by playing the opposite of Catenaccio and by playing a ‘false 3’ in a move that was so good, it’s obvious anyone who has a fast full back will now try to copy it, probably with hilarious consequences in Div 4.
There was loads more. I haven't even mentioned Denmark and their literal Lazerus impression, both individually and collectively coming back from the brink of elimination to seemingly rude health. The fact the tournament has seemingly transcended its brush with mortality and the grubby voyeuristic fascination with which an intensely personal drama played out so grimly publicly speaks of the quality of the football.
Purists might say that this wasn’t a technically wonderful tournament and that it lacked the overall quality of other years. I say ‘get in the sea’ - it was terrific. A good game is a good game. It doesn’t matter what the statistics say about the player’s individual aptitude - It matters how well matched the teams are - matches like Italy v Belgium, France v Germany and a good number of others were absolutely spellbinding.
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| Over to Peter Walton to speak weirdly formally like someone doing an answerphone message when answerphones first came out. |
I even (and it takes a lot for me to say this) didn’t mind the VAR that much as they seemed to resolve to use it to check a few things quickly and only intervene if it was a truly shocking decision. People moaning about the Sterling foul (as the most recent example) are missing the crucial point that it *was possibly* a penalty (no, really, it was) and there is no way it *definitely* wasn’t (don’t argue, you are wrong.)
In order to establish whether it was or not, we’d have had to sit through minutes of frame by frame analysis from millions of angles and come up with a decision that was still at its heart, a human decision where the possibility of an error remained. It would therefore still be subject to tedious argument and debate. VAR is far better with a simple rule - if you aren’t sure, go with the ref and make the decision quickly.
I’d still rather be without it every minute of every day, but this version is more palatable than the OCD version we’ve had in England. It’s closer to the concept of ‘umpire’s call’ in cricket than the idea of a god in the sky spotting minor things the ref has missed. It’s truly a misunderstanding of football to believe that replaying stuff slowly allows some kind of pure objective truth to arise. It doesn’t and VAR is better for accepting its own limitations.
Whilst Sam Matterface has not been a tournament highlight, in the media in general it has been genuinely lovely listening to analysis of football that (outside of the kerfuffle about England’s conversion to the Bolshevik cause and their attempts to secretly storm the palace and install Laurie Cunningham, Brendon Batson and Cyrille Regis as the divine Protectors of England) that have been about football and football alone.
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| I for one welcome our new overlords. |
That sounds daft when Football is a 24/7 media storm, but when we’re talking about domestic football, we’re so often really talking about the financial implications of promotion or relegation, a contract saga, the inner politics of the boardroom at a particular club, a takeover, a sponsorship deal and so on and so forth. With international football, the most important factor is, there’s no significant financial consequences for failure. Take Scotland - going out in the first round or making the final doesn’t really materially impact on their ability to qualify for the next world cup. They don’t get some huge prize, they can’t buy more Scottish players. They can’t bankrupt themselves in an attempt to ‘stay up’ in the world rankings. All they can do is do the best with what they have.
The stakes and rules are pretty much the same for England. It’s only our own perceptions of where the two nations should be and realistically appraising the pool of available footballers that separates the fact that England going out at the same stage as Scotland would be a disaster, whilst for the Scots, it’s a marked improvement on recent history. Belgium’s defeat was a sad one - not because Lukaku will now leave for Italy and De Bruyne go and play for Holland instead but because their squad was a freakish glitch of talent in one generation and age is inexorably catching up on them as a collective. There is no option to cash in on these player, no ability to sweep the globe for the next crop. If they ain’t Belgian, they ain’t playing and that’s the beauty of it.
I'm not saying there isn't wealth involved, England's Premier League money has paid for an incredible array of facilities and programmes, but ultimately, the consequences of victory and defeat are both tangible but amorphous. They’re pride, glory, disgrace, shame, joy, disappointment, frustration, relief, ecstasy, agony and so on. Not £250,000,000.
Have we as supporters and onlookers missed that money? Has its absence detracted from the narrative? Did you think ‘Ah, well, there’s no money riding on this?’ when England had a shaky spell against Denmark? Did you think ‘I don’t know why their so pleased, it’s not like there’s much TV money at stake’ when the Swiss put the French out?
I certainly didn’t.
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| Cheers Gazprom. |
It would be, of course naive to suggest the whole tournament isn’t a money spinner, dominated by corporate interests and staged to maximise revenue. It is. However, unlike domestic football played across Europe, the actual shape of the tournament has remained beautifully simple. Everyone plays the same number of games. For North Macedonia to win, they need to overcome the same hurdles as Italy.
They play the same number of qualifying games, they play potentially the same number of matches in the finals. They get equal coverage in terms of the number of matches televised. There’s a certain symmetry in that when it’s finished, everyone goes back to square one and has to qualify for the next one (hosts aside) on an equal footing. Despite growing exponentially in size over time, the basic shape and concept remains unaltered. Ok, the calculations of the ‘best 3rd place team’ is a bit tricky, but compared to the domestic European competitions, it is blissfully simple.
I loved it.
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Now for the clouds.
The Champions League by comparison doesn’t captivate me at all. Having been glued to this tournament, I wondered why I don’t seem able to rouse myself to watch it's domestic equivalent. It *should* be something that I love. I like seeing exotic teams, new players, different grounds, unfamiliar kits and yet, I can barely find the interest to check the scores online. I think it’s because of the painfully convoluted structures and the way they preclude the sort of drama this tournament generated.
Why do I think this?
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| A: Excuse me? Official: Yes? A: Why do I have to run further? Offical: Because he's Spanish and you're from Albania. That's the purity of competition for you. |
Firstly, we see a host of qualifying games taking place which gets rid of half the field. This seems strange, given the field have all qualified by achieving a position in their domestic league. It’s not like they can just move to another league in order to avoid the pre qualifying. It’s akin to asking a nation to play an extra tournament to demonstrate they’ve the right to be a nation. It’s not akin to the qualifying for an international tournament, because the domestic season plays that purpose. The pre qualifying teams have often WON their league, where as those who enter later often haven't. Is anyone confused yet? The champions of Albania don't qualify, but the 4th place team in Spain do. Is that clearer?
So why are these teams, with less resources, playing more games? I really enjoyed watching the ‘smaller nations’ take on the bigger ones. I was one of the few that actively enjoyed the knife edge of Scotland vs England for example. The Champions League seems hellbent on avoiding Shelbourne vs Liverpool or Bohemians vs AC Milan at all costs. Ok, Liverpool and Milan will win 9999 times out of 10000 but the one time they don’t will be glorious and written in football history forever.
The argument would probably come down to 'playing too many games', but we can soon put pay to that. After we’ve got through the ‘sorry, you’re not from a rich enough country you’ll have to qualify again stage', we get to the ‘now we’re going to have a needlessly long league stage stage’ where any chance of a shock is ruled out by the fact that if, by some miracle, Shelbourne have qualified, they then have to play 8 games against the bigger teams, home and away, to ensure that even if they win one, it won’t have any real consequences.
Not only are the bigger clubs bigger, richer, fitter, we need to remember, they’re also kept in cotton wool, not playing any games in the tournament until this point, so their advantage is compounded.
Less games, more resources FC vs Less resources and more games FC (*8)
This might come across as moaning, but I’d invite you to imagine if we’d all watched the opening round, enjoyed it greatly and then say, Switzerland had had to play a France team that hadn’t featured in the group stages at all, receiving a bye to round 2. The narrative around the tournament would be so much less compelling. The simple beauty of it: 26 players, X number of games, everyone with the same demands, same potential for injuries, fatigue etc. It just doesn’t apply in the Champions League. We’d surely feel that France had an unfair advantage.
The ‘we can’t let the little teams play, because there’s too many games’ argument also fails to hold water when you look at the qualifying rules. The ‘elite’ countries get more clubs into the competition than others. Some countries get 4 teams automatically into the group stages, others get 1 team into the pre qualifiers.
Now, ok, we might want to see ‘quality football’ played by good teams, who doesn't?... but just consider this thought experiment… (I’m assuming you’ve a) enjoyed this tournament and b) have enough imagination to follow a simple alternative reality…)
What if nations were allowed to enter their B, C and even D teams on the basis of their previous performance? A reward, if you like, for their success in past years? Would that have improved this tournament? You could make a strong argument that Germany or Spain B, C or even D would be ‘better at football’ than say North Macedonia, Scotland or Hungary.
It stacks up mathematically, the bigger nations with larger populations and bigger diasporas to draw upon can logically provide 3 or 4 teams worth of players better than the standard of the smallest ones. Why don’t we do that? Stop bothering with borderline developed nations from Eastern Europe and messing about with teams like Scotland and Wales and raise the standards? Who wouldn’t want to watch Spain B? They’d be better on the eye than some lump with a razor blade in his sock up front for a post communist country trying to wrestle the ball in the goal…
That is, in my opinion, a reasonable, if blunt and reductive summary of the ideology behind the Champions League.
We have lots of teams who aren’t ‘the champions’ playing lots of games against other teams who also aren’t ‘the champions’ whilst teams who are ‘the champions’ are culled so those teams that aren’t ‘the champions’ don’t have to play against the teams who are ‘the champions’ As a result, the tournament lacks a genuine integrity or a compelling simple journey.
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| The "finished in the top 4 of certain leagues vs the champions of other leagues league final" (On BT Sport) |
It might be ‘quality football’ but it is contrived football. It’s a construct. It is theatre in which I can’t suspend my disbelief because the stage hands of UEFA are trying to act as if they're invisible but they keep taking my attention from the football because their handling of the scene changes is so obviously visible and clumsy. To this extent, I preferred the ESL - at least the stagehands were up front about it and I knew exactly what to expect. If it's a construct, be honest and I'll watch it as such.
As we’ve mentioned before, in the last few weeks, Holland, Belgium and France were eliminated and go back to square one. Just like everyone else. For say, Chelsea or Inter Milan, for Real Madrid or PSG, elimination often happens at a point where they’ve almost certainly qualified for the next tournament - because the barrier of finishing in the top 4 of the domestic league is so low in comparison to the resources of the clubs. There's almost always a 'next year' and almost always a path straight to the latter stages.
If England lose, it will be crushing because we might need to wait another 55 years for the same chance. That's what makes the game so big. It's a distinct possibility we may not even make it out of the group next time or heaven forbid, not even qualify. Can you say that for 6,7,8,9,10 or even more clubs in domestic European football? I honestly don't think you can. Only by making it a competition for Champions alone could you raise the stakes and bring a similar meaning to the possibility of defeat.
The last time I really followed an English club in Europe was when Leicester got through and before that, it was probably the crushing failure of Everton in 2005 - why? Because there was a genuine excitement as neither club were likely to get there again as a matter of course the season after. Scarcity brings value. It’s a simple economic fact.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen Belgium play Italy and I almost certainly will never see a high stakes game between the two featuring Chiellini and Vermaelen (and probably some others for whom age is catching up with them) - to me, that’s a good thing. It makes that game a must watch. Something unique. It’s not going to happen again for at least 2 years, if not many more and those particular teams will be different next time around.
What I find turgid about the Champions League is it feels more or less the same tournament played out over and over and over. It doesn’t value scarcity at all. It’s about packing as many of these games in, as often as possible and to do so, it takes the simple beauty of cup/tournament football and warps it into a bizarre shape.
Essentially, this piece is to say ‘well done’ to Uefa for not fucking up the Euros. By doing so, I’m also saying ‘see, look at what you can do’ and inviting them to apply the same standards that have made this a terrific tournament (watched by record breaking TV audiences) to their domestic tournaments.
This may not be what the global mega brand clubs want, but if UEFA really wanted to grow the status of the game culturally and economically in places like Ireland, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and so on, it would remove the absurd and unsporting concept that (rich in football terms) countries like England and Italy get more teams in the European Cup than (poor in football) countries like Poland or Romania AND THEN get rewarded by their coefficient improving because obviously, they are more likely to achieve success, being richer and having more chances of success.
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| Countries a) for whom the latter stages of the Champions League are an automatic reality, season after season and b) are likely to win it. (Porto and Ajax aside) |
This really has felt like a festival of football from across the continent. The Champions League really doesn’t.
The fact we can remember teams like the Czech Republic, Greece and Denmark reaching finals, even winning the trophy and we've seen the potential for similar feats this time round tells us everything. Look at recent semis and you see Turkey, Wales, Russia, Sweden... Can UEFA honestly say they can see Brondby or AEK, Besiktas, Spartak Moscow, Connah's Quay or Sparta Prague lasting long in the Champions League? Getting to a final or a semi final? It seems less likely by the year that anyone other than the big five will win, or even get anywhere close. Doesn't that tell us something about the competition?
Why is international football more exciting? Why can giants be slain in competition A) but habitually stamp all over their puny foes in competition B)? It's got to be about structures and the way those structures shore up the status of the teams that win financially, so thereby repeating the cycle ad infinitum.
I genuinely can't understand why UEFA seem to be making the Champions League even more convoluted and even more skewed in favour of certain teams when they also seem capable of producing a belting tournament of classic simplicity. It seems to me, incredibly simple to produce something similar from domestic football but the exact opposite seems to be the plan.
EURO 2020 felt like a competition where possibilities were alive. The Champions League feels like a trudge of fixtures staged in the most interminably boggy manner in order to produce a largely predictable outcome.
It’s up to you UEFA.
You can give us a football competition based on simple, elegant rules, open to all in Europe on an equal basis, or you can take the money and continue your closed shop complexity and illustrate that you value five or six countries above all others because of the value of their brands.
We know you can do both. So no excuses.
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