There are three (kind of four) major international soccer tournaments this summer. Euro 2024 kicks off first.
Summer. School’s out. The smell of salt air and sunscreen. The soft warm light of a June sunset. The sound of children playing with reckless abandon and music pumping out of speakers at beaches, pools, backyards, and block parties. Several hundred multimillionaires draped in the colors of their countries in a semi-nationalistic sporting ritual held over from the late 19th century.
International soccer is kind of weird, in that it is a vestige of how soccer — and to a certain extent the world, but we don’t need to get into that — used to be.
From the time England and Scotland played the first ever official international friendly until maybe 1999 or so, the best players from any given country tended to play in that country. It was difficult for any single club team to stockpile too much international talent, because they generally weren’t willing or able to spend that much money and there were rules in place in most countries about the number of foreign players you were allowed to have on your roster at any given time. This meant that international soccer was the absolute peak of the sport for a long time.
That has changed with the amount of money and coaching expertise now at work in the club game. Whereas it used to be that Argentina would be better than Manchester City because Manchester City had roster construction limitations in the form of limited cash and roster inflexibility, the inverse is now true. Manchester City are now better than Argentina because they can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get any player from anywhere in the world to fill a position of need. Argentina spent a long time not winning anything in part because there were no competent professionals who played goalkeeper and were from there. Also club teams spend a lot more time practicing together and as a result tend to be more able to execute on high-level tactical plans.
But though international soccer is maybe no longer the peak of soccer in terms of sporting performance, it is the absolute peak of the sport as a spectacle.
No sport brings more drama than international soccer. It’s partly because people just care more about the international game, in general. Some combination of national pride and nostalgia for the epic international games of their youth makes the players and coaches and fans all go a little bit more nuts during international tournaments than they do normally. Look at Andres Cantor call Argentina’s penalty shootout win at the last World Cup final.
And the same roster construction limitations that make international soccer less able to reach the performance peaks of the club game mean that these tournaments preserve a bit more of the randomness. I’ve written before about soccer as chess if chess also had a slots component, and nowhere is that more true than the international game.
There are no top-level left backs from your country? Too bad! Better figure something out, because now you’re playing in a single-elimination match and one weird bounce means you’ll have to start all over and try again in two-to-four years. International teams, even the best ones, can end up with odd weak links, which means the chaos is much less controlled on the biggest stage.
It’s the combination of passion, randomness, and stakes that makes international soccer so great, and this summer is full of international soccer: The men’s European Championships and Copa America, and the women’s Olympics are three of the absolute best international tournaments, and they are all taking place this summer.
The first competition is Euro 2024, which kicks off today in Munich.
Ahead of the first match of a summer of international soccer, here are a few key questions and narratives, starting with the host nation.
This tournament is in Germany. They are supposed to always be good, and yet they went out in the group stage at the last two World Cups. What’s going on there?
What’s going on with Germany generally is a complicated question of national identity, international and internal migration, and broad socioeconomic trends.1This Masha Gessen essay is really excellent in painting a picture about a truly strange moment in historical memory in Germany.
What’s going on with Germany in terms of soccer is the combination of a slightly awkward generational transition and a few consecutive tournaments of bad luck.
In 1990, the English striker Gary Linkear remarked “Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.” This quote has gotten a lot of mileage over the years, to the point that it is a pretty tired cliche.
In 2021, Linekar said it was time to retire the phrase after England defeated Germany in the Round of 16 at the Euros. This was right in the middle of a particularly low three years for the program: Group stage exit in Russia in 2018, that elimination by England in 2021, and most recently another group stage exit in Qatar.
Two things happened to create these embarrassing results: First the 2014 World Cup-winning squad aged a little faster than anyone anticipated and they got caught in an awkward generational transition. So many of the important players to that 2014 squad — either stars like Mesut Özil or younger key role players like André Schürrle or Mario Götze — ended up declining from their peaks by their early 30s. And the generation younger than the key 2014 stars ended up not being quite as good as consistently. Götze is the most notorious example, but Julian Draxler also never quite reached the heights he promised for Germany. So there was a gap of eight or so years where a lot of veterans were no longer there to be relied on and the first replacements up weren’t able to reach the same heights.
Second, they were crazy unlucky, particularly at the last World Cup. They generated a ton of chances, and just could not score as many goals as they should have. They had the best expected goals, and the best expected goals differential at that tournament. The ball goes in at a slightly more normal rate and maybe they end up in the semifinals.
With the tournament on home soil, the safer money is on Germany to be good than bad this summer. And with a few more real young stars now entering the squad in Jamal Musiala and Florian Wirtz, maybe the awkward transition is over and their luck will start turning around.
Is bisexual England more powerful than regular England?
England is a small island nation that briefly conquered much of the world and then spend several centuries becoming more and more insane. Along the way they invented football, but they forgot to ever get good at it.
However, the last three men’s international tournaments have shown that England have finally put together a team capable of winning a trophy.2The “golden generation” of 2000-2010 also was hypothetically talented enough to win something, but those squads were mostly composed of distasteful individuals who hated each other passionately, so they never came particularly close. They came achingly close to winning the last Euros and then played quite well at the World Cup, where they had a genuine shot at eliminating France in the quarterfinal. They haven’t quite gotten over the hump, but they’re getting close.
Perhaps the thing that will finally give them the last push is their new woke kit.
In case you missed it, in March of this year Nike released the new England jerseys for this summer’s European championships, including a “playful update of the St. George” on the collar.
A playful update to the 🏴 of St. George appears on the collar to unite and inspire. pic.twitter.com/lXEjXhbIJO
— Nike Football (@nikefootball) March 18, 2024
People reacted to this normally.
Just kidding! This is England, so it became a whole culture war thing because all of the most annoying people on the internet assumed that it was woke for no reason other than that they assume everything is woke and the colors are vaguely the same as the bisexual pride flag. Tons of people, including the Prime Minister, decided to become Mad Online about this topic.
Eventually the furor died down and a supremely talented squad of proud bisexual allies will wear the kit to the Euros, where they are betting favorites to win the whole thing.
This is a joke, but here is something that is at least tangentially interesting: In 2021, conservative politicians went insane over wokeness in the England squad because of prematch anti-racism kneeling, and the Three Lions came within a couple of penalty kicks of winning the tournament. In 2022, there was no wokeness controversy and they were eliminated in the quarterfinals. It’s possible, if incredibly stupid, that the flag thing will revive some of that “us against them” camaraderie from the last Euros and push England towards victory.
More to the point, their starting XI is likely to feature the reigning Bundesliga top scorer, the best player in La Liga last season, the best player in the Premier League last season, one of the best right wingers in the world and one of the best midfielders in the Premier League.3In order: Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice.
It took them a while, but England men are just legitimately good now.
Is it time for France to win, or to implode?
Up until the very end of the 20th century, the French record in major international soccer tournaments was spotty at best. But then a combination of massive immigration and a centralized national team development structure turned the country into a legitimate soccer powerhouse, and they finally won the World Cup on home soil in 1998.
Since then, major tournaments tend to go one of two ways for France: They either win or come extremely close to winning the whole thing4Champions at Euro 2000, runners-up at the 2006 World Cup, runners-up at Euro 2016, champions at the 2018 World Cup, runners-up at the 2022 World Cup. or manage to flame out by the first knockout round, 5Group stage exit at the 2002 World Cup, eliminated in the Round of 16 by Greece at Euro 2004, finished last in their group at Euro 2008, literal players’ mutiny on the way to to a group stage exit at the 2010 World Cup, weird extra-time implosion in the Round of 16 against Switzerland at Euro 2020/2021. with exceptions for quiet but respectable early knockout round exits to all-time great sides at Euro 2012 (Spain) and the 2014 World Cup (Germany).
There is not exactly a discernable pattern here, so you can’t do the 2010s San Francisco Giants even year World Series thing. France in men’s internationals just tend to be either boom or bust, and it’s hard to know exactly which one it is until the tournament starts.
Current signs are pointing to this being a boom year. First of all, they are just supremely talented. Look at this roster. Every single player on this team is one of the best players on one of the best club teams in Europe. Those that are merely one of the ten best players on their club team happen to be at the same club as their France teammates.
⚠️ 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙤𝙛𝙛𝙞𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙀𝙪𝙧𝙤𝙨 ⚠️
— French Team ⭐⭐ (@FrenchTeam) May 31, 2024
Whose shirt do you want? 👕
👉 https://t.co/jpRby5bagl#FiersdetreBleus pic.twitter.com/btrjy2eeMF
Also, the 21st century collapses have tended to happen in tournaments where there were major shifts in the squad or when the team had been playing very poorly in the lead-up to the tournament. The 2010 World Cup roster featured many of the same players that reached the final in 2006 but was notably missing the leadership and calming midfield presence of Zinedine Zidane and Patrick Vieira. And they had barely qualified, needing an uncalled Thierry Henry handball assist to squeak by Ireland in a playoff.
At the last Euros, the squad clearly had issues reintegrating Karim Benzema after his sex tape bribery scandal exile.6French football man! What a world. Benzema never quite clicked back into an attack that had been refitted around Olivier Giroud, and they were never able to put teams away.
That is very much not the case this year. The core of this squad is largely the same as the one that nearly won the last World Cup, and aside from a couple of friendlies against Germany they haven’t lost a game since that shootout against Argentina. This is an experienced squad who are playing well leading into this tournament.
But if the vibes seem off in France’s first match against Austria in Düsseldorf then who knows? Stranger things have happened to the French national team.
Are there any smaller central or eastern European teams that might be fun?
You bet there are!
A popular dark horse pick is Ukraine. Obviously the larger story around the country gives this tournament some real poignancy. Soccer is very low on the list of the most important things to the Ukrainian people right now, but at the same time the national pride of success on the soccer field would be genuinely meaningful to a country fighting for its self-determination.
And on the field, this team is legitimately good! They’re likely to start striker Artem Dovbyk, who was the leading scorer in La Liga last year with 24 goal for Girona. Oleksandr Zinchenko had a poor second half to the season for Arsenal but is a uniquely gifted technical player. They weirdly have two borderline great goalkeepers in Andriy Lunin and Anatoliy Trubin.
They’re also in a relatively forgiving group, featuring Slovakia, Romania, and the ghost of Belgium’s 2018 World Cup team. Ukraine have a very clear path to the round of 16, and from there on it’s knockout soccer and anything can happen.
Slovenia are less straightforwardly good, with a squad that is a little heavier on Europe’s lower leagues than that of Ukraine. But there is a definite formula for them to surprise. As mentioned in the Germany section, variance can really make or break an international tournament. If you can somehow score more goals relative to the chances you create, or concede fewer goals relative to the chances you give up, you have the bones of a good tournament run. And while Slovenia don’t have a good squad they do have players that could get hot at the right time in the right positions.
First off, their veteran keeper Jan Oblak has been one of the world’s best for nearly a decade. If Oblak plays somewhat near his best, most of Slovenia’s games will at the very least remain close.
Then up top Slovenia will feature one of the most promising up-and-coming strikers in Europe in Benjamin Šeško. Šeško was third in the Bundesliga in goals per 90 minutes last year, and ninth in non-penalty expected goals. For the national team, he scored four goals in qualifying for this tournament. Plus he’s 6 foot 5 with a good first touch and decent with both feet. Check out this “skills and goals” montage set to pretty bad trap music.
Šeško just signed a new contract with RB Leipzig, but he’s one of the most widely tracked transfer targets, particularly for the big Premier League teams. If Benjamin goes Šeško Mode7Sorry this summer, he’ll be playing for a European giant sooner rather than later. And if he does that in conjunction with a good performance in net from Oblak there’s a decent chance Slovenia make a run. 8Worth noting that this “world class goalkeeper plus world class striker, no one else of note on the team” formula is a good descriptor for Poland, who never really do anything at major tournaments.
Other teams to watch in this category: Serbia and Croatia are both stacked with talent, even as Croatia’s iconic core continues to age. Hungary won their qualification group, beating Serbia twice in the process. They’re in a fairly navigable group, with second place behind Germany very much up for grabs between them, Scotland, and Switzerland. Plus Dominik Szoboszlai is exactly the profile of busy, shot-happy attacking player who can go on a streak and carry a team at an international tournament.
Elsewhere, Austria pretty much kept pace with Belgium in qualifying, have a squad full of players who are very comfortable with coach Ralf Rangnick’s style, and are in a group featuring two teams that have generally underperformed at major tournaments in Poland and the Netherlands.
Finally, Turkey are in eastern Europe geographically if not culturally, and though many people were burned by them finishing dead last in the last Euros after being a popular underdog pick they could be good this tournament. They won their group with just one loss in qualifying and have a few very exciting young attackers in Arda Güler and Kenan Yıldız. Plus the tournament is being played in Germany where you can expect every game to be packed with Turkish-Germans loudly supporting their team. 9Also no one else in the world cares about this, but the spelling situation for Turkey is unclear to me at the moment. The current government is really pushing for everyone to stylize it Türkiye, and the US State Department and certain NGOs appear to be adopting it. But the AP and most mainstream media are still going with Turkey? Would love some guidance here.
All men must face the relentless onward march of time towards an inevitable conclusion — all plots move deathwards, as Don DeLillo writes. And yet it seems like Cristiano Ronaldo is still playing for Portugal. What’s going on there?
Cristiano Ronaldo is a somewhat puzzling figure in the year 2024.
An unquestionable all time great of the game, it has now been nearly two years since he looked Piers Morgan dead in the eyes, said that if all he cared about was money he would go to Saudi Arabia, and then went to Saudi Arabia.10Technically it was Morgan who said that if it was just about the money, Cristiano would go to Saudi Arabia and Cristiano merely agreed with that statement, but still.
Disappearing from European football to score a billion goals as an ambassador for an autocracy is just the latest move in the past eight or so years of the Cristiano Ronaldo experience that has shifted him from a love-him-or-hate-him ego-driven pantomime character to an actively distasteful off-the-field presence. Between that and the accusations of sexual assault,11Charges were dropped, but people on the internet will be quick to point out that both Juventus and Manchester United very conspicuously avoided touring the United States in preseason when he was on their roster. it has become much more comfortable to just ignore him, especially as the Messi-Ronaldo wars are over for all but the most annoying people on Twitter.
And yet, Cristiano the athlete has delivered one more miracle — he has managed to stick around for long enough for Portugal to actually become good.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal career has two distinct eras: First, when he was a young phenomenon and bursting into a team that still had lots of great players from the ‘90s like Luis Figo. Then, those guys retired and it was basically just him and a cast of mediocre-to-competent professionals for close to a decade.
This second period also coincided with the stretch where he was one of the two best players in the world, largely due to sheer relentlessness and volume. For most of the 2010s, Cristiano Ronaldo simply could not be stopped from getting a shot off: In each of his first six seasons at Real Madrid, he averaged at least 3.0 shots on target every 90 minutes, including averaging 3.71 per 90 in the 2012-2013 season. For context, last season’s La Liga leader in shots on target per 90 was Vinicius Júnior with 1.83. And because he kept on shooting, he kept on scoring: 311 goals across nine seasons in Madrid.
But with Portugal, because the rest of the team wasn’t quite as good, he was never quite as able to shoot at the volume that he has always required. That changed, at least in Portugal’s perfect qualifying campaign.
Roberto Martinez rebuilt the starting lineup to more prominently feature younger stars like Bruno Fernandes, Rafael Leão, and João Félix. As a result, Cristinao is relieved of all of his non-shooting-the-ball duties.In qualifying, he scored 10 goals off of 5.74 shots per 90 and 2.37 shots on target per 90.12These numbers include 3 penalties. Penaldo, etc. Those are Real Madrid-adjacent numbers.
And again, Portugal won all 10 of their qualifying games for this tournament. They are less reliant on Cristiano Ronaldo than ever, but he’s also still playing pretty well for them, and able to focus on the part of his game that has always been his biggest strength. He might be able to delay the end for just a little bit longer.
Xherdan Shaqiri?
That’s right.
Is this the year that Belgium’s “golden generation” finally pulls through
No.
Or at least, insofar as Belgium might do well at this tournament, it won’t quite be the “golden generation” that triumphs.
Romelu Lukaku and Kevin De Bruyne are still around, but Eden Hazard was really the talisman of that era and he’s gone, along with tons of key figures of the 2018 World Cup semifinal run. Thibaut Courtois, Dries Mertens, Mousa Dembélé, Vincent Kompany, and Marouane Fellaini are all out of the Belgium set-up for this tournament.
This Belgium squad is less “golden generation” and more “golden generation remnants plus some new talent.” And who knows? Jérémy Doku, Johan Bakayoko, and Amadou Onana all have semi-realistic paths to being some of the best players in Europe in the next decade. If they step into their new roles, and De Bruyne and Lukaku can reach somewhere close to their earlier heights, Belgium might be pretty good.
Did you forget to do any research into Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands? Aren’t those three of the best teams?
Traditionally yes, but I don’t really know what to make of any of them.
Spain are the easiest to understand: If they remember to put the ball in the net they will probably be very close to winning the whole thing. The problem with Spain at the last few international tournaments is that they sometimes prioritize possession at the expense of chance creation, and sometimes they manage to generate a lot of chance but not score, and sometimes they are just genuinely really good. Sometimes all three of these things happen within the same tournament. They’re more likely to be good than to be bad, but they have also sleepwalked into penalty shootout defeats at three consecutive tournaments. Weird team!
Italy, on the other hand, are the reigning champions and they were really good at the last Euros. Then they immediately followed up that tournament by failing to qualify for the World Cup, which makes it hard to feel too confident in them.
Plus, it’s worth noting that at least some of their Euros performance was boosted by homefield advantage. Euro 2020 was a weird spread out tournament with cities across Europe hosting matches. Coincidentally, three out of the four eventual semifinalists – Italy, Denmark, and England – were teams that played significant portions of their tournaments at home. In the subsequent World Cup cycle, Italy failed to qualify, Denmark were a disaster in their group, and England stalled out against France in the quarterfinals. It’s entirely possible that homefield advantage slightly inflated the performance at the last Euros.
The Netherlands are an enigma. Frenkie de Jong and Teun Koopmeiners are key midfielders and they’re both injured. Virgil van Dijk seems less impeccable than he once was. And though they came close to a World Cup semi final in Qatar, they had a pretty soft run to the quarters and if not for some luck and Louis van Gaal wizardry they might have lost to Argentina much more comfortably. Louis van Gaal is notably no longer the coach of the team.
But, there is some reason for optimism: Xavi Simons and Tijjani Reijnders have both broken out in top five European Leagues this year, and Micky van de Ven’s pitch-burning speed might be exactly the cover needed for van Dijk’s declining dominance.
It’s hard to bet on the Dutch to win it all because famously they usually don’t do that,13David Winner’s Brilliant Orange is maybe the best soccer book ever written, and is largely about the Dutch national team’s twin tendencies for masterful soccer and self-destruction. but they have a decent chance at being good.
Can we get some good Khvicha Kvaratskhelia highlights?
This question is less of a narrative and more of request. Georgia are playing in their first ever major international tournament as an independent nation, and though they aren’t very good they do have one of the most entertaining players in Europe right now.
Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is an old-fashioned dribbling wizard, who was electrifying in both his individual moments and in his partnership with Victor Osimhen in Napoli’s title-winning 2022-2023 Serie A season.
He also pulls off stuff like this when he’s playing with the national team:
The way the ball is literally glued to Kvaratskhelia's foot on the initial drag-back is outrageous 😳
— Georgian Footy (@GeorgianFooty) June 20, 2023
🎥 https://t.co/5J5N0LC6lD pic.twitter.com/1IOzEmWWOL
Georgia has a rich football history that was largely sublimated under the larger Soviet umbrella. This tournament will be the first time a Georgian star can shine on the international stage as a Georgian.
It might be for only three games, but my biggest hope for the tournament is that we can all watch Kvara show out in Germany. Maybe we can all go for khachapuri and amber wine afterwards.
Any songs to go with the Euros?
This is the European Championships, being played in Germany, so the sound of this tournament has to be wall-to-wall Eurodance. You will absolutely be hearing lots of “Freed From Desire.” Anticipate “Alors on danse” We can only hope that something off the new Charli XCX album makes it into rotation, since her sound is broadly in the lineage of Berlin basement speaker systems.
But if you’re looking for a new song that conjures some of that classic ‘90s dance spirit and fits into a summer of soccer in Germany, I’d suggest this new Justice/Tame Impala tune.
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