Out with the old, in with the new

The 2023/24 season is now over, so all hail Euro 2024, the most understated international tournament I can remember.

Out with the old, in with the new. The 2023/24 season is dead, long live the 2024/25 season. Actually, that’s only a half-truth. Some might argue that the season ends with the various league AGMs, over the course of this month. These are the points at which their constitutions for the new season are ratified, where promotion and relegation are signed off. From an administrative point of view, your league’s AGM is a good place to start.

But increasingly, it might come to be seen as the end of June, when football’s new accounting year starts. This is when the accounts are usually in by, and it’ll almost certainly be the cut-off date between twelve month periods for the purposes of, say, whatever jolly caper they come up with to replace PSR in the Premier League.

There’s almost certainly a rumbling of fingers coming in my direction over the upcoming European Championships themselves, but I count them as the summer. I don’t—and I don’t think I could—consider a summer tournament to be part of either season. Perhaps this season that’s the cut-off point between old and new.

Not, of course, that any of this matters anyway. The truth remains that in England there are no more club matches of much consequence to be played. A couple of international warm-up friendlies, maybe an intermediate league match or two postponed eight times since the middle of December. But otherwise… hear ye! Hear ye! I do declare the 2023/24 season to be over! And no! I’m not counting this weekend’s friendlies as part of the 2023/24 season!

But all of this does lead us on to Euro 24, which starts at the end of next week in Germany. This tournament finds me at a strange point in life. I’ve been freelance for exactly a year now. Progress has been slow and extremely painful, and we absolutely do not have our heads above water yet, but things, as I type these words, are slowly improving.

Unexpected Delirium is also exactly a year old tomorrow, so I’ll take this opportunity to thank everybody who’s supported us over the last year or so. Progress has, again, been extremely slow and painful, but it just about pays enough to justify continuing. I have plenty upcoming for the Euros, including some freelancing, a podcast a week, and I’ll add some commentary on here. I would ask again that you do consider subscribing if possible.

Is it just my imagination, or is the build-up to this tournament feeling extremely low key? You could easily drift through your life not really knowing that Euro 24 is happening, yet it starts a week on Friday night, and furthermore that SCOTLAND are playing in the opening game.

Of course, the close proximity of the end of the domestic season plays into this mild feeling of disconnect. Good luck having a gap of any sort when clubs, associations, venture capitalists and the like have each got a hand round the neck of that golden goose and are wringing it for all it’s worth. They’ve even shuffled in a round of friendlies for this coming weekend. Small wonder Mister Gareth played the rezzies against Bosnia & Herzegovina on Monday night, 48 hours after the Champions League final.

It’s tempting to think that the players won’t be going hell for leather either, that their clubs are their employers and that if they’re going to take their feet off the pedal this is an opportunity to do so. But then, players aren’t built the same as us normal schmos. The competitive edge which got them this far in the first place isn’t just a switch that can be turned on and off. Their very nature, drilled into them from an early age, is to be competitive.

There will be genuine fatigue, and injuries feel like a genuine risk after this many matches and the sort of schedules that modern players have to keep. Remember; the Championship is a 49 match season if you get to the play-off final. But no-one seems to care very much about that. Not while there’s precious money to be made.

I wonder to myself whether we’ve just had the last World Cup. Or whether it was the one before last or perhaps even the one before that, which was ten years ago this summer. I start to wonder the same about the Euros, too. 24 teams seems like a lot for this tournament, but who’s to say that UEFA won’t increase it again? And what would the players’ reaction be if they did?

Increasing from 24 to 32 wouldn’t actually increase the number of games to be played in the finals. The jump from 16 to 24 has already taken care of the need for an extra round. You might even argue that going from 24 to 32 teams would reduce the number of matches because more qualification places should mean fewer qualifying matches, wouldn’t it? SHOULDN’T IT? Whatever. The idea of them scaling it back to 16 teams again already seems inconceivable. 

There also remains a feeling that, considering the absolute state of the outside world at the moment, this might not even be the best time to be playing a European Championships in a country in roughly the centre of Europe, at a time when populist far right politics are gaining traction the length and breadth of the continent. There's no way whatsoever that could go wrong now, is there?

But then, perhaps for those of us watching from home, if we can take our eyes off the black shirted/cargo short-wearing pillocks throwing plastic furniture at each other in some city centre or other, there might even be an interesting tournament to be had, here. There’s certainly no clear favourite. Three teams lead the pre-tournament favourite spots; England, France and Germany.

Considering that they’re leading the betting to win the tournament, the mood in England feels surprisingly glum. Perhaps it’s the small matter of a GENERAL bloody ELECTION having been deposited into the middle of the tournament, an attention-hoover at the best of times when these are resolutely not the best of times. “Everybody must pay attention to us”, they shout, with rictus grins and the overall demeanour of waxwork dummies from the morning after The Great Fire of Tussauds. Oh aye, lads? What, exactly have you done to deserve my eyeballs?

England’s results haven’t been especially good since beating Italy in their qualifier in October; an underwhelming win against Malta and a draw against North Macedonia, followed by a home defeat against Brazil and a scrambled draw against Belgium. Gareth Southgate will be in for a torrid time, should England start to fall short of… whatever expectations are. Is it winning? Do people expect England to win Euro24? What a world.

Losing to France in the quarter-finals to France at the end of 2022 resulted in a tangible change in mood, but there is much to be optimistic about. Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden were players of the year in La Liga and the Premier League respectively. For all the honking laughter at his failure to win any actual silverware, Harry Kane scored 44 in 45 in all competitions for Bayern Munich. Bukayo Saka has had an outstanding season for Arsenal. There is an overflow of attacking talent and options. There are considerably greater questions to be asked about the defence, but just look at those attacking options.

England have a group that they should be able to navigate their way through. Denmark, Serbia and Slovenia contain booby traps, but it is realistic to expect them to qualify. France are the second favourites. They face Poland, the Netherlands and Austria in their group. They still have Marcus Thuram, Antoine Griezmann and, of course, Kylian Mbappe, fresh from his transfer to the club he supported as a child or the club for whom he was never going to play, according to taste. He scored a hat-trick in the World Cup final, you know.

Germany are the hosts, and their club teams—in particular Bayer Leverkusen—have had excellent seasons in Europe, while their two results prior to last night’s goalless draw against Ukraine were impressive. But they haven’t got past the group stage of their last three major tournament finals, a run that now stretches back to 2016 and the pressure on the team may be high. Behind these three, there’s a strong chasing pack; Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium.

So, here’s the plan for this place. We’re going to be back on the podcast from Sunday 16th, and that’ll be weekly until the end of the tournament. I will try to get something up on here as close to daily as possible, but I am working for FotMob during this tournament and that kind of has to take precedence, though I should have time for both. I’m tempted by the idea of doing some live-blogs, because they’re fun and they’re done by the end of the match, but they’re also a tricky time commitment when I have kids chasing each other around the house with plastic swords while shrieking.

And the pre-tournament starts here, I guess. I’m planning the traditional kit review because we’ve been doing those for 18 years and I’m not stopping because everyone else does them too, as well. There’ll be a preview for each group, the first of those within 24 hours of this being published (and ideally within 12).

I was also going to write a venue guide for the tournament, but that’s now morphed into something else in my head, and what I’m now hoping to do is write something about the history of football in Germany through the cities hosting it this time around. It’ll have gaps (obviously), but there are some interesting stories in there, and German football is unusual for having been a relatively late developer, having not truly turned professional until the 1960s. But more on that over the next week and a half.

With a relatively open field (would you completely discount Italy, Spain, and no clear favourite, perhaps Euro 24 can offer an antidote to the sterile end to the domestic season, in which money and status won. A palate-cleanser. A busman’s holiday, for many of us, and not uncommonly an opportunity to reconnect with our inner ten year-old.

International football feels different because it is different. It often feels as though it’s not recognised as being the very different discipline to club football that it is. Players meet up just a few times a year. The manager or head coach has to have a plan that can be quickly and easily assimilated into the players’ heads. There’s no transfer market. All concerned have these short sprints of time together, and then the group dissipates again. These differences can present themselves in strange and unusual ways once the football gets underway.

My pre-tournament prediction is for France. Didier Deschamps has been in position since roughly the dawn of time, and it remains the case that in a coaching career that not dropped below a win ratio of 50%. His team came within a penalty shootout of fundamentally disrupting The Messi Narrative a year and a half ago.

Recent results have been a little sloppy, with a slightly scrambled 3-2 win against Chile, two friendly defeats to Germany and an underwhelming draw in Greece. But then, they did beat Gibraltar 14-0, so there’s that. But then… there’s no team in this tournament without flaws. That’s always the same, with international football. What matters is whose flaws are the least fundamental, and we’re all about to find that out.