Major tournaments nowadays seem to be where idealists go to die.
If you have an ambitious, expansive style or a romantic philosophy, forget about it. If you want your football to stand for more than a box score, don’t bother. In between the quarter- and semi-finals of the European Championship, a cultural correction has taken place, almost overnight.
Up until the last-eight stage, performances were important. The ‘how’ behind wins and progress through the tournament mattered.
It preoccupied the French that they hadn’t scored a single goal from open play (and still haven’t). When asked about his team’s style, or lack of it, by a Swedish journalist at a press conference yesterday, head coach Didier Deschamps replied: “You’re Swedish? No, you are a French journalist in disguise! If you are getting bored, watch another game, you don’t have to watch.”
It also bothered the English when Gary Lineker, the former England striker leading the BBC’s coverage of the Euros, said with some justification that their team played “s**t” against Denmark in the group phase. Victories were whistled and plastic cups were thrown post-game at head coach Gareth Southgate, who spoke of an “unusual environment“.
Meanwhile, the Dutch didn’t like the way their team got out of the group as one of the best third-place finishers. “We want to show beautiful football, but that doesn’t always work,” their manager Ronald Koeman observed. More was expected. “It’s tournament football” didn’t cut it. It didn’t excuse everything.
But it fleetingly does now. It is accepted.
Deschamps has reached four semi-finals in five tournaments with France, for Southgate’s England it is three out of four. Koeman has the Netherlands in the final four of the Euros for the first time in 20 years. A threshold has been crossed. The sentient graphs have lurched from negative to positive.
Walking around the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park, you’re reminded of the Leninist-Trotskyite variations of, “The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.” On the one hand, it exposes the fickle, hypocritical and reactionary nature of some of the commentary. Football has always been about glory. As Italian club Juventus’ motto goes: “Winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing that counts.”
Spain have been the only exceptions at this tournament. Only they have aspired, and been able, to ‘vencer y convencer’ (Spanish for ‘win and convince’). Other idealists, such as Austria coach Ralf Rangnick and Italy counterpart Luciano Spalletti, have fallen by the wayside. “I don’t know how to do it. I think I’m the least-suited person to do that,” Spalletti said, when asked following their round-of-16 elimination if his team, the defending champions, should have tried to play less football and more “tournament football”.
Luciano Spalletti admitted he could not change Italy’s approach (Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
Spalletti didn’t adapt as predecessor Roberto Mancini did at those previous Euros three years ago, when Italy played an idealistic and counter-cultural style, dominating possession and pressing high until Leonardo Spinazzola’s tournament-ending injury in the quarter-final against Belgium changed the accent of the team.
Italy, traditionally perhaps the greatest exponents of “tournament football”, had to lean more on goalkeeping heroics and the defensive resilience of Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci towards the end of Euro 2020. But overall that team, and Spain’s between 2008 and 2012, did show it is possible to win tournaments with a big idea, something more ambitious and grandiose. That’s three of the four European Championships before this one. So, within that context, “tournament football” is the exception, not the rule.
But you can see why tight, gritty, ugly football predominates.
International football is squeezed ever more to the margins by the club game. Before the Euros and Copa America happening in parallel in the United States, how much time have the coaches had with their players in this calendar year? The answer is 10 days, in March. Ten days in six months. In a nine-month league season, you can trust the process. In a month-long major tournament, you take everything game-by-game.
“Every match is different, every strategy is different,” Turkey coach Vincenzo Montella said. “The players I have available before every game is different. I’ve come in for a lot of flak recently because I never play the same starting XI. But the team that you have in your mind isn’t going to be available for 40 days, the same players aren’t always going to be in the best state and that’s not even factoring in suspensions. In today’s game, by the time you get to the end of the season, an ideal starting XI does not exist. It just doesn’t exist anymore.”
The players are knackered. They play more than ever. The Euros expanded from 16 teams to 24 in 2016. The Champions League is getting bigger as of this September. A third European club competition, the Conference League, has emerged in recent years. A much-larger Club World Cup is coming next summer. Competition organisers have more games to sell. More games mean more money. But they also mean fewer training sessions are available to coaches and, when the the players aren’t recovering, what little time is left is often better dedicated to opposition analysis and set-piece drills rather than their own patterns of play.
Most of the teams look and play the same, ending in nuanced variations of 3-2-5 in possession. Games are deadlocked. The level of intensity is low. Three of the four quarter-finals in Germany went to extra time.
When spectators complain of boring games, a different game begins: the blame game.
Southgate, Deschamps and Koeman, for all their flaws, are hostages to their own choices, but also to context and circumstance. The business is killing the spectacle.
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At the Copa America, Uruguay coach Marcelo Bielsa’s press conferences have been a better spectacle than the actual football.
It used to be that South American teams were fresher for tournaments in June and July because their domestic league seasons began in February or March, whereas in the top European nations they started the previous August. Now though, almost all international-standard South Americans play for clubs in Europe.
“There was one match in which the Uruguay team ran the most,” Bielsa said, “it was in a qualifier against Chile. It was in September. Four games into the league season (in Europe). Now, they have already played 40 or 50 matches (this season). Playing twice a week then (in September) is one thing. Playing twice a week in month nine or 10… that type of effort is a different thing.”
Between lamenting how his team only created three chances in a goalless quarter-final against Brazil, which ultimately was decided by a penalty shootout, Bielsa downplayed his role in Uruguay reaching the Copa America semi-finals for the first time since 2011.
There has been no revolution since he was appointed 14 months ago. There hasn’t been time for one. “If you’re asking about the relevance of the changes or what had a greater weight? The changes I made or the profile of the players? I think the profile of the players is what prevailed in defining the team,” Bielsa said.
It couldn’t be any other way in today’s game, and that saddens Bielsa.
“I have no doubt that football is on a downward curve,” he said. “More and more people watch football but it’s less attractive because we’re neglecting what turned this game into the world’s favourite sport. The way we play now is not protecting the spectacle. This favours business, because business’s priority is to have as many people watch as possible. But I believe this will come to a halt.
“As time goes by, the players that deserve to be watched will become fewer and fewer and the game less and less attractive. So that artificial increase in the number of viewers is going to come to a stop. Football is not a five-minute highlights package. It’s cultural expression.”
Football has always been about moments. But it used to produce movements too.
In a pre-globalised age, countries had their own football identities. Now they all resemble one another, just as all high streets resemble one another. It’s the Apple-fication of football.
“More than the Americanisation, it’s the materialisation (of the game),” Zvonimir Boban, the former Croatia international who is now chief of football at UEFA, the sport’s European governing body, said recently. The corporatisation. Clubs as asset classes. “Executives don’t come from football anymore. They talk about ‘industry’. These are the terms they use. It’s an ‘industry’. What? It’s not an industry. It’s a sport.”
The industry may pay its players and their coaches better than ever. But it drives them harder, and the spectacle suffers. The result — unless a World Cup comes in the northern hemisphere’s winter, halfway through a European season — is this iteration of tournament football.
Idealists may as well join the Dead Poets Society.
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(Top photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)