Was Euro 2024 up there with the classic tournaments? For me it’s hard to imagine any tournament comparing with Euro 2000. That was Zinedine Zidane at his peak, the brilliant, neurotic Dutch, the heroic Pavel Nedved losing his one-man war against group-stage elimination – and that was just Group D. Euro 2000 was Figo, Totti, England lurching from shambles (2-3 v Portugal) to glory (1-0 v Germany) and back to shambles (2-3 v Romania), and, unforgettably, “Alfonsooooo!!”
Equally, I have to acknowledge that maybe the real reason I’ll never love another tournament like Euro 2000 is that I can never be 21 again. All my basic brain circuitry has been laid down, and in fact is already decaying, like a regional Deutsche Bahn network. Only minor alterations are possible now, at least until everything starts turning to liquid. The memories now are all overlay. The new ones are recorded on mental tapes that have already been reused a thousand times. The images are never again going to be as bright or as vivid. Nothing will ever feel as real.
Those personal limitations in mind, Euro 2024 still felt like fun. The best team won, the final and semi-finals were good matches, the Spain-Germany quarter-final was great. There were minor classics like Turkey-Georgia in the Dortmund thunder and Austria-Netherlands in the Berlin sun, there was amazing individual drama like Ronaldo v Slovenia or maybe we should say Roberto Martinez v Portugal.
The stadiums were full, the fans seemed up for it. A lot of the fans at every game were, of course, Germans, and it is clear that Germany’s love of football is right up there with its love of cigarettes, any combination of bread and meat, and towel waste. (Germans seem obsessed with sorting their rubbish into various abstruse categories, yet love to yank fistfuls of paper towels from the dispensers; every bin in a post-match stadium bathroom looks like a postbox under a snowdrift. Maybe this is revenge against the system.)
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There was, however, an undeniable slump in the middle phase of the tournament, one which I believe existed independently of my slumping personal energy levels. The thing obviously goes on too long. There was sense of slowdown as a largely dull second round took a week to do the job the group stage used to do in the days of the 16-team tournament.
This change has extended the tournament by a week, which has the unanticipated effect of alienating the knockout phase from the sense of excitement that surrounds the groups. (If you have not been to an international tournament, you might assume that it gets bigger and more exciting as it goes on, but actually the real fiesta feeling is during the groups, when everyone is still there.) By the time of the return to Munich for the France-Spain semi-final it had been nearly a month since more than 100,000 Scots were there for the Germany match, but it felt more like it had been 40 years.
The more obvious effect is that it makes the tournament drag on too late into the summer, reducing players’ recovery time to almost nothing – Manchester United played their first pre-season match yesterday!
The sport is increasingly stalked by a sense of burnout and exhaustion. At the COPA America, the Uruguay coach Marcelo Bielsa has attacked the way things are going: “I am certain that football is in a process of decline. More and more people are watching this sport, but it is becoming less and less attractive.”
[ Spain show the world what football is all about. For England, the wait goes onOpens in new window ]
The physical wear and tear on the players is clear. There was a grim example in the COPA final as Lionel Messi’s right ankle buckled way beneath him as he crossed with his left. The injury looked terrible. We are lucky Messi has already lasted more than 1,000 matches. With injuries like this, there will not be many more.
The psychological impact on the players is harder to gauge but listen to Jude Bellingham’s hollow-eyed TV interview after losing the Euros final. “It’s so tough these days with the crazy schedules ... and then coming together for end of the season for one last tournament, it’s difficult on the body. Mentally, physically you’re exhausted.” Bellingham is only 21.
The mental exhaustion is perhaps not so much the product of too many games and not enough recovery as it is of the social environment in which the players have to perform. Gareth Southgate, earlier in the tournament, suggested that fear – specifically of public humiliation – was preventing his players from showing their best form. “I’ve talked to a lot of psychologists over the years – one of the things that human beings want to avoid is public embarrassment.”
It was a less pithy way of putting the truth famously expressed by Twitter user @maplecocaine: “Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.”
Playing badly in a major international tournament match is an instant shortcut to main characterhood. On Monday the England team provided a whole ensemble. There was a viral two-minute supercut of all Declan Rice’s mistakes in the final. Clips of Jordan Pickford weeping also proved wildly popular, while Bellingham’s public image has rapidly metamorphosed from Real Madrid superhero to out-of-control egomaniac. If someone had headed in at a set-piece and they had beaten Spain they would all be getting hero-worshipped, but this is what players now have to deal with, it’s glory or ridicule, nothing in between.
Bellingham is supposedly acutely aware of the criticisms that are made of him but when criticism is on this scale, how could you not be? The Argentine coach Jorge Sampaoli made the point in a pre-tournament interview with El País. “The functioning of a football team [today] is summed up in a self-salvation argument: ‘let’s win today because otherwise they kill us all’ ...[On social networks] the player lives in a place of constant and cruel judgment, where people express all their resentment and pain. The social network is a social sewer.”
According to Sampaoli: “The happiness of playing football doesn’t exist [any more]. There is an obligation to win so that the business can move forward. They have money but they are not free. They live in VIP prisons. They are more inserted in the virtual than in the real.”
Players today often find themselves being attacked on the basis of performance data, which according to Sampaoli has led to a culture where they play to boost their recorded stats in order to avoid being singled out for criticism. “The performance [culture] is sad because it conceals the implicit threat of savage daily judgment and dismissal. This is oppressive because everyone tries to avoid being judged: players, coaches, managers, network users ... And judgment comes to everyone!” Think about this if you’re still puzzled as to why Ronaldo cried when he missed that penalty, but not when Portugal were knocked out.
Still, what a show all the players put on, and we look forward to seeing them all again a month from today, when Europe’s major leagues are all back for the 2024/2025 season.
