Euro 24, Group A: Permutations > Goals
The host nation are among the favourites to win Euro 24, but whether they can or not will depend on how strong the roots of their recent revival are. The race for second and third looks tighter.
This has been a distinctly uncomfortable few years for the German men’s national team. They haven’t got past the group stages of a major tournament since losing their Euro 2016 semi-final to France, with their last World Cup elimination resulting in Hansi Flick becoming the first German national team head coach to be sacked from the position. Assessing the prospects of the Nationalmannschaft on home soil, therefore, will ultimately come down to one question: have they truly turned that corner yet?
Things certainly didn’t improve that much following their early elimination from the 2022 World Cup. With no competitive games to play thanks to their automatic qualification as hosts, 2023 brought eleven matches, of which they only won three. It was starting to feel as though their rut might be chronic, but this year has brought a bit of an upswing which has led to confidence levels slowly starting to rise again and the feeling that Julian Nagelsmann is turning a corner with the team. They’ve only won two games in 2024; the difference is that they’ve only played three games.
The improvement has been faltering, but the trajectory has broadly been in an upward direction. Following their World Cup debacle, Germany returned to action with a draw against Ukraine and a loss in Poland, followed by home defeats against Colombia and Japan, a 4-1 home reversal against the team that had beaten them in Qatar just a few months earlier which proved the end of the road for Herr Flick, who was sacked the day after the game.
A demonstration of how patchy their revival might be came with their remaining matches in 2023. Three days after the (second) Japan debacle and two days after Flick’s departure, they beat France 2-1 in Dortmund. A month later, bu which time Nagelsmann had been installed, they had a similarly welcome 3-1 win away to the USA. But then that feeling of progress ground to a halt again with a draw against Mexico and losses to Turkey and Austria before the end of the year.
But 2024 brought something of a mood change, again. In their March friendlies they were impressive in beating France for a second time in just a few months, this time 2-0 in Lyon, and the Netherlands in Frankfurt. But their recent goalless draw against Ukraine was less than inspiring, so their final warm-up game against Greece on Friday night may offer further clues as to the current position on their rollercoaster ride.
Against Hungary, Switzerland and Scotland, this should be a winnable group for the hosts. But the question of how that up and down confidence might hold up in the face of a slow start is valid. Germany don’t just need their second wind to exist; they need it to be strong, too. They’ve certainly had a successful season at club level. Borussia Dortmund reached the final of the Champions League, while Bayern Munich got to the semi-finals and Bayer Leverkusen reached the final of the Europa League.
If confidence counts for anything much, the Leverkusen players in the squad should be overbrimming with it at the end of a record-shattering unbeaten domestic season. They won the Bundesliga by thirteen points as well as the DFB-Pokal, their only defeat coming in the Europa League final against Atalanta.
The problem is that there are only three of them—Jonanthan Tah, Florian Wirtz and Robert Andrich—in the preliminary squad of 26 for the finals. Contrast this with Bayern Munich, who were eliminated earlier from the Champions League, finished well short of them in the league, and were knocked out of the DFB-Pokal by third division Saarbrucken this season, but who also have six players in the squad.
There remain issues. Manuel Neuer is now 38 years of age and has looked creakier than he was in his prime in the not-so-distant past. Marc-André ter Stegen is right there as a replacement and started the France and Netherlands matches. But Neuer started against Ukraine and kept a clean sheet, so who does Nagelsmann go with for their opening match against Scotland?
The other obvious issue with this Germany squad is goals. Thomas Muller is the highest goalscorer in the squad with 45, but he’s taken 129 games to get to that number and only five others in the entire squad have scored more than ten, including Toni Kroos and Ilkay Gundogan, who’ve taken 184 games between them to get to the 35 that they’ve managed.
The promise in this respect comes from Niclas Fullkrug of Borussia Dortmund, who may be 31 years old but has scored 11 in 15 for the national team despite becoming the oldest outfield player to make his debut for Germany when he came on as a substitute in a friendly against Oman just a year and a half ago.
Germany kick off the tournament against Scotland, a team who made their return to the finals of the Euros three years ago after an absence of a quarter of a century. For Scotland, the aim this summer is very clear: get through the group stages of an international tournament finals for the first time. This is their twelfth attempt, with their previous eight in the World Cup and three in the Euros having all ended in failure.
This summer’s competition offers an opportunity. The expansion of the tournament to 24 teams has meant the necessary inclusion of a round of sixteen, with four third-placed teams joining the twelve group winners and runners-up in the knockout stage. Scotland have been close before—and never closer than at Euro 96, when only a late Netherlands goal against England put them out on goals scored—but perhaps this summer is their opportunity to take advantage of sneaking into one of those third places. A win and a draw would likely do at least that.
Scottish readers may well be forgiven looking on at Germany’s potential goalscoring ‘issues’ with a wry smile. Only one player in the current Scotland squad is in double figures in terms of goalscoring for their country, and he’s a midfielder, John McGinn. Furthermore, scoring goals was their big issue in the last iteration of this tournament, in which a return of just one in three games was enough to help towards seeing them finish bottom of their group. Recent friendly results—a 4-0 defeat to the Netherlands, a home loss against Northern Ireland and a 2-0 win in Gibraltar which was workmanlike and no more—don’t hint at much recent improvement, either.
But there are grounds for a degree of optimism, too. McGinn had an excellent season with Aston Villa and has qualified for the Champions League. Scott McTominay is a decent shout for a goal from midfield as well. And in a group in which third place may be enough to sneak through to the knockouts, there will always be a chance that they could achieve this. One win from their other two matches and nothing else could be enough to get them through, but it would be out of their hands and dependent on goal difference, if at all.
Their chances will substantially grow should they be able to take something from their opening match in Munich a week on Friday. There’s been much talk of growing German confidence in recent weeks, but after the few years they’ve had it wouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprising if that confidence was somewhat brittle.
Scottish shoulders may have sunk a little when they saw that they were playing the hosts in their opening group match, but playing Germany first might be better for them than playing them last. The heat will be on in Munich, on that Friday evening, but it won’t be on Scotland. This is a free swing for them, and they certainly know how to frustrate. They proved that against England at Wembley three years ago.
Hungary are from Eastern Europe, so it was probably inevitable that they would end up being labelled as ‘dark horses’ following a decent run of form and an unbeaten record in qualifying for these finals. Captain Dominik Szoboszlai is much-loved—although the start to his career with Liverpool wasn’t quite stellar—and head coach Marco Rossi has demonstrated that you don’t have to come from a country to intimately understand its football culture.
Talking of which… It remains to be seen whether the black-shirts who prompted so much comment last time around will be greeted with such enthusiasm this time around, considering that the politics behind that movement are likely to be. The enthusiastic support of Viktor Orban is a definite turn-off when it comes to this team. Ever have that type of politician done thus.
And if we’re going to talk about football culture, then Hungary is definitely a country that should know the risks of dropping expectations of matching their greatest ever team upon current editions better than most. The Hungary team of the early to mid-1950s was one of the greats, a genuine contender for the best international team never to have won a World Cup, but it feels unhealthy to hold up such a freakishly brilliant and innovative team as the expectation level that more recent Hungary teams should have to live up to.
This is bad enough in a country like England, a country of 58m people, but for a country with a relatively modest population—just under 10m—and no recent history of major European success at club level, this sort of comparison seems all the more unfair. Be prepared for someone to start calling Szoboszlai “The Galloping Major” or a variant thereupon should Hungary start putting a few results together, regardless.
But they’re not a one man team. If anything, they're greater than the sum of their parts. Some of those parts are very good indeed. Willi Orban of RB Leipzig is an outstanding central defender, while his club team-mate Peter Gulacsi keeps goal. Roland Sallai of Freiburg scored twice when Hungary beat England 4-0 at Wembley in the Nations League a couple of years ago. But like some others in this group, Hungary don’t have any real international goalscorers in their squad. No-one in their 26 has scored more than the 12 that Szoboszlai and Sallai have managed, and the next highest is Orban, with six.
Their opening match against Switzerland, to be played the following afternoon in Cologne, looks too close to call. The Swiss team certainly isn’t lacking in experience. Their preliminary squad of 26 features eleven players with more than 50 caps, five of whom have more than 80. This team remains built around a spine of the 2009 Under-17 World Cup winners. They’re all experienced. They’ve all been around each other in these circles for a long time.
Captain Granit Xhaka has just completed an outstanding season as the double-winning captain of Bayer Leverkusen. Yann Sommer, Fabian Schar, Manuel Akanji and Breel Embolo are all excellent players, though it should be added that hereby lies their biggest issue; Embolo is unlikely to be fit for the start of the tournament, which may leave them somewhat over-reliant on Xherdan Shaqiri for goals, and he’s only scored 14 of them in two and a half years for Chicago Fire in Major League Soccer. Otherwise, it may be on Steven Zuber of AEK Athens.
Something hasn’t quite been clicking for Switzerland, this last couple of years. Since June 2023 they’ve only—at the time of writing—lost once, but they’ve only won four times too, with their other six matches ending in draws. And a lost of this was against modest opposition. Two of those wins, for example, came against Andorra, while four of their six draws came in other qualifiers against Kosovo (twice), Belarus and Israel.
Xhaka openly criticised head coach Murat Yakin at the start of September, which led to a meeting being called for the clearance of air. How much of that still lingers? And how combustible might Switzerland be? The experience is definitely an advantage in this respect. Older professionals should be trusted to know when the right time is to speak up and when the right time is to buckle down and do your job. September is a reasonable time to air a genuine grievance. The start of June would not be.
The arrival of a new assistant head coach, Giorgio Conte, in March led to Yakin shifting his tactical formation, with immediate results. A goalless draw in Copenhagen against Denmark and a 1-0 win away to Ireland quickly followed, and this round of friendlies has already yielded a 4-0 win against Estonia. They have one more match to play, a friendly against Austria which should provide a stiffer test than their last match. Three consecutive clean sheets hints at a team that could be difficult to break down. Look forward to centres holding it.
Germany should win the group. That much is obvious. But the question of who follows them up is considerably murkier. Hungary look like the team with the momentum, but all three of the other teams in this group have both the capacity to frustrate and potential issues with goalscoring. It might be tight between them, and that does give Scotland an opportunity. Don’t necessarily expect too many goals in this group, but do expect mathematics and permutations.