Euro 24, Group D; A Two-Horse Race
France and Netherlands are clear favourites to qualify from this group. Is there any chance that Austria and/or Poland could upset them?
As one of the three favourites to win Euro 24, France go into the tournament with something of a burden of expectation on their shoulders. Football expects, and that creates a little weight to have to carry. But the good news for France is that this remains a squad of so many talents that they can just ease new players in when the older ones start to fall by the wayside.
Hugo Lloris, for example, had been their goalkeeper for almost a decade and a half until his retirement. This was expected, and a couple of years prior to this the process of bringing through his replacement started when Mike Maignan was called up for a couple of friendlies in 2019 and then given a debut the following year. He has still only made 16 appearances for his country, but is already becoming entrenched as their first choice goalkeeper.
It’s this churn that makes France a perennial contender in the modern age, but like England one of the question marks that does hang over their team is defensive. With Raphael Varane now also having retired from the international game there has remained no settled French central defence, yet still the most likely option they have will be to shuffle the immensely talented Jules Kaounde into that position. Problem solved? It’s tempting to say “Voila!”, but it does remains a tiny chink in the armour of a team that could otherwise look impervious.
Qualification was, of course, a breeze, with the most eyebrow-raising result being the 14 goals they put past Gibraltar without reply. But recent results have been a little patchier. Most troubling of all to eternal head coach Didier Deschamps will have been home and away defeats in friendlies against Germany, but there have also been a couple of others that, despite experimental formations, give cause for concern.
Their final warm-up match only brought a goalless draw against Canada, who were statistically one of the worst teams at the last World Cup. Prior to this they’d had narrow win against Chile and an uninspiring 3-0 win against Luxembourg. They’re good, but the destination of the Henri Delaunay Trophy isn’t yet quite decided and France have been known to implode at major tournaments before. Those who expected great things from them in 2002 and 2010, for example, ended up extremely disappointed indeed.
Much will, of course, come down to the influence of Kylian Mbappe. This particular corporation has just completed a takeover by Real Madrid, so where will his head be with everything else that’s been going on in his life this last few weeks or so? Mbappe has been known to come across as a bit sulky on the pitch when things aren’t going his way, but these were the actions of a young man.
He’s 25 now, and can’t afford any more of that sort of thing. The leadership qualities that should be a fundamental part of his captaincy of the team need to come to the fore. And this even this sort of very mild questioning feels a little silly when we remember that he scored a hat-trick in the last World Cup final. This is the level at which he plays, and when France rise to that they can look unstoppable.
The team most likely to stop them in the group stages are the Netherlands, and the match between these two teams, who meet in their second match in Leipzig, is one of the most hotly-anticipated of the entire group stage. The two teams met each other in qualification, in the opening round of matches, in a match that became embroiled in controversy after a food poisoning incident involving a chicken curry which led to five players—including Cody Gakpo, Sven Botman and Mattijs de Ligt—missing the game.
Eight minutes in, the Dutch were already 2-0 down and staring down the barrel of a gun. Things improved from that beyond dismal start, but not much. They ended up losing 4-0. Two Mbappe goals were enough for France to win the return match in Amsterdam, too.
The Dutch have now recovered from the wobble they suffered a decade ago, when they failed to qualify for Euro 2016 and the 2018 World Cup, but performances once in the finals haven’t been incredible—they reached the round of sixteen in 2020 and the quarter-finals in 2022—but how far can they go this time? France will be expected to beat them, but the Netherlands will be looking at the other two teams in their group and considering them to be beatable.
There are problems. First choice goalkeeper Justin Bijlow has had injury issues and his back-ups lack experience, while Frenkie De Jong and Memphis Depay are in the squad with injuries. These are important players for the Dutch team. De Jong and Depay are unlikely to be risked in early matches, and their replacements will be under pressure to keep the pot boiling. But the Netherlands will expect to qualify from this group regardless of injuries.
One of the more emotionally affecting images from the 2022 World Cup finals was Poland’s elimination from the competition in the second round. To be fair, that they’d got this in the first place was largely down to providence. They’d only qualified for the knockout stage in the first place on goal difference, thanks to Saudi Arabia scoring an injury-time consolation goal against Mexico, scored five minutes into stoppage-time and with their opponents already leading 2-0.
Their luck ran out in the second round against France, but already 3-0 down and with nine minutes of stoppage-time they did at least get a penalty of somewhat greater emotional significance than it had literal significance. The kick was converted by Robert Lewandowski, and it was widely assumed that this would be his final valedictory moment for a player who was coming to the end of a lengthy international career.
Boy, did we ever all get that wrong. Lewandowski has just… kept going. He scored 26 goals in all competitions for Barcelona, of which 19 came in the league. There had been a poignancy to that penalty kick in France a year and a half ago. One of the greatest strikers of the 21st century had lifted his team—now regular qualifiers for these jamborees than they had been for the previous twenty years—but couldn’t carry them further than the quarter-finals at Euro 2016. Small wonder he couldn’t resist one more roll of the dice, for all the previous rumours about his international retirement a couple of years ago.
And it’s worth bearing in mind that he remains the fourth highest international goalscorer of all-time, behind Cristiano Ronaldo, Romelu Lukaku and Ferenc Puskas, because that also says something about Poland. The second-highest goalscorer in their current squad is Kamil Grosicki of Pogoń Szczecin, who is already 36—Lewandowski doesn’t hit that milestone until August—and also made his debut for the national team in 2008. He’s got 17.
It’s this over-reliance on Lewandowski which has both returned Poland to major tournament qualification on a regular basis while perhaps limiting them once there. ‘Give it to Lewa’ may work in a qualification group in which the only teams to finish below them are Moldova and the Faroe Islands, but they’re unlikely to work against France or the Netherlands.
There is both talent and experience there. Jakub Kiwior made twenty Premier League appearances for Arsenal this season, while the Emirates connection continues with Wojciech Szczęsny, still going at 34 years old for Juventus. But Poland still only finished third in their qualifying group (behind Albania and Czechia) and only squeezed in through the play-offs after beating Estonia and then Wales on a penalty shootout. But it’s difficult to see how they’ll be able to take anything from France or the Netherlands, and that makes their chances of getting through in third place seem remote.
Poland’s second game against Austria will likely decide if they have an interest by the final round of matches, and an Austrian team that had been looking as though it could really blossom has suffered terrible luck with injuries over the last few months, but without question the biggest loss is David Alaba, absolutely the sort of player you can build a team around, who tore his ACL playing for Real Madrid against Villareal at the end of last year.
Austria have other talent, too. Marcel Sabitzer, who got to the Champions League final with Borussia Dortmund at the end of last season, is the captain. Max Wober of Borussia Moenchengladbach is in the centre of their defence. And they still have Marko Arnautovic, the wind-up merchant’s wind-up merchant, still going at 35 years of age, and still rubbing some people up the wrong way with his very existence (and also some of the stuff he says as well as quite a lot of the stuff he does). He remains the late substitution wildcard to top them all.
All of this is headed by the quietly brilliant Ralf Rangnick, whose brief cameo appearance at Manchester United for the second half of the 2021/22 season was quietly demonstrative of the stupid arrogance of that club. Rangnick had his feet held to the fire just as others had before him and have since, but his comments about United’s dysfunction were pretty much on point, and his success in taking Austria to these finals and briefly being courted by Bayern Munich in the spring, only for him to spurn their advances in order to continue in this position, has vindicated him. Austria certainly seem like the greater threat to France and the Netherlands.
And it is worth remembering that Austria usually have an excellent canon of first names. I feel as though I should mention that their Euro 2024 squad features a Heinz, two Maximillians, a Gernot, a Leopold, a Flavius, two Florians, a Romano, and a Konrad. Now that’s how you name kids.