A brief oasis of football before what will replace it begins again
Got a strange feeling as you watch the Euros? That'll probably be because you're watching a sport again, rather than a grotesque parody of what sport used to be.
It’s Thursday morning. The kids are at school. The house is moderately tidy. And there are still three hours until Croatia and Albania kick off in Hamburg. Much as I may complain about not earning enough money (subscribe here!), there is always a point during an international tournament when I have cause to celebrate the fact that this, for me, has for some years constituted ‘work’.
There are three matches today, and the second intersects with the school run. West Sussex County Council continues to persist with infant schools, middle schools and high schools, so my kids are at different ones. This requires me to walk in a triangle, picking junior up from his school, then senior from his, and then walking them both home.
I’ll need to leave the house at 2.30, but I won’t get back until about twenty minutes into the second half. Of course, I could just watch it all from my phone, ignoring my younger kid all the way from infant to middle school and then ignoring them both, all the way home. But I won’t, because their reviews of the packed lunch I made can be extremely persistent and regardless, you need full attention to herd cats on a fairly busy main road. This is, I do fully acknowledge, very much a ‘first world problem’.
But if you’re going to chronicle the bad times, you should chronicle the good as well. I have work during this tournament, writing bits and pieces for Fotmob. It’s keeping me busy, and in a way in which I like. These are short little pieces, so I don’t have to watch every game in granular detail, so it all dovetails very tidily with the plate-spinning I have to be perpetually carrying out in order to keep this house functioning.
Of course, it’s international football, which is something approaching the purest form of the professional game to exist. There’s no transfer market, so smaller nations aren’t going to get all their best players poached off them by bigger ones. This tournament has been going for six days, and I haven’t thought about transfer fees once. Sponsors are pushed relatively into the background, rather than endlessly being pushed into your grill to try and persuade you to GAMBLE MORE.
Constant squeezing of the fixture schedule means that coaches simply don’t have the time to instil deeply complex tactical systems into their players, so games have a more rustic feel to them. Even in the tikitastic 21st century, “Lump it up to the big lad” can still be a surprisingly effective instruction when all else fails. This is a world in which Wout Weghorst can thrive, doing the only thing that Wout Weghorst can do.
Furthermore, everybody wants to be there. Nationality has a way of getting under people’s skin, so even though this isn’t making most of them anything like as much as their club football does, the number of players going through the motions is vanishingly small. And it’s more than just a ‘shop window’; you only have to look at the way in which Turkey and Georgia absolutely went at each other in their opening group match to see that.
This is all reflected in the coverage of the competitions. For those fortunate enough to be working in Germany at the moment it’s the ultimate busman’s holiday, and this comes across in the way in which commentators, pundits and hosts talk about the games. They can barely contain their delight at it all, and this can be infectious for those watching from home, as well. The sheer volume of the match between Turkey and Georgia, for example, could very much be felt from a distance.
And then, of course, there’s the sheer volume of it. For these four, sweet weeks, taking up eight hours of your day by watching three consecutive matches between nations that you have no preference over is considered perfectly normal behaviour. The games just keep coming, perfectly spaced to also give us just enough time to maintain a facade of being fully functioning human beings for a while.
FIFA and UEFA think they understand this, and that they can feed this monster while continuing to earn themselves more and more lovely loot by simply growing and growing their tournaments. As ever, they know the price of everything about the game without understanding its value in the slightest. Everybody has a tipping point for their attention spans. There’s only so much we can take, and it feels as though FIFA’s upcoming 48-team World Cup will push that to its logical extreme. The state of that golden goose by the end of the summer of 2026 will be instructive, if nothing else.
I have to admit, I do worry about how I’m going to reintegrate back into the Premier League and the like after all this. Professional football is facing many simultaneous nightmares at the moment, from clubs suing leagues to end the notion of competitive balance to the wholesale colonisation by the grotesquely rich, ballooning ticket prices, and fixture scheduling tomfoolery. All of that will have to be faced up to after this brief oasis of actual football has ended, so enjoy this while it lasts; it might well not be around in this form for much longer.