Euro 24, Group B; Group of Death, or Group of Near-Death?

Italy, Spain and Croatia all face each other in the group stages, but who will stand and who will fall?

There are few matters more likely to provoke an argument in football circles than what actually constitutes a Group of Death. What we do know is that its first recorded use can be found in relationship to the 1970 World Cup group featuring tournament holders England, favourites Brazil and 1962 runners-up Czechoslovakia in the Mexican media, so it is at least perhaps appropriate that this summer’s edition should feature Spain, for linguistinc reasons, if nothing else.

Spain are not quite what they once were, but remain atop the hill they once occupied was always going to be a tall order. A European Championship followed by a World Cup followed by a European Championship was always going to be a tough act to follow. But that fall away has been clear. They haven’t got past the round of sixteen of the World Cup since they won it in 2010, although they did reach the semi-finals of the last iteration of this tournament before losing on penalties to their group opponents, this time around.

Qualification was, of course, a breeze. Spain qualified as group winners, four points clear of runners-up Scotland and ten clear of third-placed Norway. Last year had kicked off in June with them winning the Nations League on penalty kicks against Croatia, and this was followed by a comfortable run of wins to ensure qualification to Germany. There was a small upset when they were beaten 1-0 at Wembley by Colombia, and this was followed by a slightly erratic 3-3 draw against Brazil.

Their departure from the last World Cup on penalty kicks to Morocco in the last sixteen seemed to sum up a well of imagination that had run dry. There remained, as there has for so many years, an abundance of talent, but under former manager Luis Enrique Spain simply looked as though they’d run out of steam. After a slow start, which included losing to Scotland, the Nations League has given them something to build upon with a semi-final win against, you guessed it, Italy, and then the practice of lifting some actual silverware with that penalty shootout win against Croatia.

Unai Simon is likely to start in goal ahead of David Raya, with a solid spine of experience—Aymeric Laporte, Rodri and Alvaro Morata in front of him. But they do also have key players missing, or potentially missing. Gavi will not be back until the autumn, while Pedri is fit, but hadn’t played in a few months. Barcelona won’t be thanking Luis De La Fuente, should the player somehow get injured again over the next few weeks.

But this is Spain, so of course some of the best players on the continent rank among their number. Rodri, for example, may have been the best midfielder on the continent over the course of the season just ended, while defeneder Alex Grimaldo has just completed the sort of season which only normally manifest themselves under the conditions of fever dreams.

Talk of a huge rivalry between Spain and Italy feels a little overstated, considering that they’re not immediate geographical neighbours—there’s no border between Spain and Italy—and no particular history of strife between the two countries. It’s also the case that the two teams didn’t meet competitively between the 1934 World Cup finals and the 1980 European Championships, which doesn’t exactly help in setting up and manfesting a ‘rivalry’. Indeed, it might even be argued that it only really became a thing once Spain started being any good.

This ‘rivalry’ means that their meeting might just be the highest-profile match of the group stages of this competition alongside the match between France and the Netherlands. The fact that their last three meetings came in the semi-final and final of the Nations League and the semi-finals of the European Championships tells you as much as you need to know about the status of these two football nations.

Italy may have won this tournament three years ago, but it’s been all change since then. Their central defensive partnership of Leonardo Bonucci and Giorgio Chiellini have both gone, as has head coach Roberto Mancini, who’s been replaced by Napoli’s title-winning Luciano Spaletti. There are plenty of faces from Euro 20 in their squad, but some of the key players have since departed while others, including Destiny Udogie, Nicolò Zaniolo, Francesco Acerbi and Giorgio Scalvini will be absent injured.

This transitioning means that Italy also have quite a young looking squad, with only four players over the age of thirty selected out of their 26. When you consider the extent to which they were dependent on the gamesmanship of Chiellini three years ago, it does feel as though the components that got them so far are broadly absent, this time around. Ciro Immobile, Manuel Locatelli and Marco Verratti are among the big names missing this time around as Spaletti seeks to change their direction after failing to qualify for the last two straight World Cups, a situation that still feels inconceivable, even though it’s now happened twice.

The other big problem with Italy this summer is the question of where the goals are coming from. There is not a single player in the Italian squad which has managed double figures, and although that wasn’t too much of an issue three years ago—when Immobile scored just twice—in a Groppa della Morte like this, alongside a decent looking Spain squad and the inglorious basterds of Croatia it doesn’t look like an advantage to have to be scraping around for a proven goalscorer when you really need a goal. Italy’s final match is against Croatia while Spain play Albania. It’s not difficult to imagine how this could become a problem for them.

It says something about the Croatia team that they have as many players with 100 caps as Italy have players over the age of thirty. There will be four of them—Luka Modric, Mateo Kovacic, Ivan Perisic and Domagoj Vida—in their squad, having racked up 509 international appearances between them. By way of contrast, all 26 of Italy’s players have managed 529 caps between them. Head coach Zlatko Dalic is also a relatively long server, having been in the job for seven years. At 38 years old, for how much longer can Luka Modric’s body take the punishment of the modern football calendar?

Strangely, Croatia’s record in the Euros is nowhere near as strong as it is in the World Cup. In the global tournament they’ve the final once and the semi-finals twice in the six times that they’ve qualified since joining the international football roster in 1990, but their Euros record is somewhat less stellar, having never got past the quarter-finals and having not managed that since 2008. Indeed, they’ve never won a knockout match in the finals of this competition.

Qualification was straightforward, although they did only finish second in their qualifying group, four points ahead of a Wales team who dropped four points in their final two matches. The wobble that Croatia had just prior to that—when they lost consecutive matches in three days to both Turkey and Wales—was as bad as things got in qualifying, but served a timely reminder that qualification isn’t completely guaranteed until all games have been played.

This is probably a tournament too far for this Croatia team. Modric will be 39 in September, and he has been a generational talent and a leader for the last two decades. Of course, plenty of people have come a cropper by making such a statement in the build-up to a major tournament, but it should be remembered that Spain and Italy are formidable opponents and that Croatia will need a big result against the designated group whipping boys Albania.

All this means bad news for Albania. This is only the second time they’ve qualified for the finals of a major tournament. On the previous occasion they were eliminated in third place in the group despite beating Romania 1-0 in their final game. With such experience elsewhere in their group, it seems inconceivable that they could finish in the top two this time around, but we’ve all been made to sound daft by making statements like that before the start of a tournament, haven’t we?

The key to Albania’s qualification was consistency. Having lost their first game of 2023 to Poland, they won five and drew three of their remaining games of the year, qualifying from their group as winners on goal difference from Czechia, with Poland pushed down into the play-offs. A couple of their results were a little worrying—draws against both Moldova and the Faroe Islands were less than enthralling—and this season didn’t start particularly well, with defeats against Chile and Sweden, though their last couple of warm-up games saw them return to form, even if they did come against relatively modest opposition in the form Liechenstein and Azerbaijan.

Sylvinho was a curious choice as their new manager, at the start of last year. Prior to this, he’d been an assistant with Cruzeiro, Sport Recife, Inter and with the Brazil national team, but when he was finally appointed into a head coach position himself, he lasted just eleven matches at Lyon and then 43 matches back in Brazil with Corinthians, where he’d begun his playaing career. Whether he has the nous to be able to out-think Italy and Spain, two of the grand of names of international football, or Croatia, one of the great disruptors of the last three decades of European international football, remains unknown but doesn’t seem particularly likely.