So Spain are champions of Europe again, having won their fourth title in this competition. They not only won all seven matches, they did it in a certain amount of style. At least once every match, one of the commentators would say that this is no longer tiki-taka football, but that's a little meaningless, since they last won a tournament with that style of football 12 years ago.
More accurate is that they had the most fluent attack, and the most redoubtable defense. They didn't win ugly, which is considered one of the marks of a quality team - rather, they won beautiful in pretty much all their games, whether it was a 3-0 against a Croatia who matched them for possession and shots; or a 1-0 against an Italy that refused to be broken down until an own goal; or after going down a goal against Georgia, the surprise package of the tournament.
I'm not normally the biggest fan of the Spanish national team, in part because of those tiki-taka tournaments in 2008, 2010 and 2012, and in part because they knocked out Italy in 2008 and 2012, the latter being a particularly brutal 4-0 hammering in the final. I'll admit that part of me was hoping to see a repeat of that today, but since I was watching with an English friend, I think it's better on balance that they kept it to 2-1.
With regard to England, they deserve some props for getting this far. Their record wasn't as spotless as Spain's, and when they won they seemed able only to win ugly. It was surprising to see how disjointed they were in the group stage and the first couple of knockout matches, given that my understanding of Gareth Southgate's tenure is that he's always been good at getting the team all playing for one another.
Still, the players kept faith with his plan, even when they didn't seem to understand it, and they made it to their second Euro final in a row. It helped that two individual moments of brilliance from Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane in the dying minutes of the Slovakia game saved England's tournament. By the end England looked like the team they'd been in previous tournaments, even though it's maybe too much to suggest they were as cohesive a unit as Spain.
Regardless of the result, and of what Gareth Southgate decides to do next, England should be proud of what the team has achieved, and how close they came to matching the women's team's Euro victory in 2022. Getting to two successive finals of a tournament is impressive, and I think it reflects how English and Spanish teams have also dominated the Champions League in the last two decades. It'll be interesting what this team looks like at the World Cup in 2026, and then at the next Euros, which will be held at home in Britain and Ireland.
As for the wider tournament, maybe it's impossible to be wholly objective as to the quality of the football. I'm just always so happy to have a World Cup or a Euro that, even if Portugal were to win with a succession of 1-1 draws and four straight rounds of penalties (which is not too far off from what happened in 2016), I'd still happily watch as much of it as I could. As I noted in previous posts where I calculated goals per game in this tournament compared with the last two, there were more goals and more exciting games, even if there weren't that many surprises or giant-killings.
That last point makes me consider the concept of England "under-achieving" at tournaments since 1966. It's the favorite refrain of England fans and pundits, that somehow the team hasn't achieved the destiny it deserves. But as the authors of Soccernomics say when they tackle this question, winning tournaments is hard. By definition, only one team can win a tournament, and when you have a knockout competition, it comes down to skill and conditioning and heavy helpings of luck.
At least at the Euros, there are about 7-9 teams that you think should get to the quarterfinals every tournament (Germany, Spain, France, Italy, England, the Netherlands, Portugal, and maybe Belgium), which means that by definition, they will all have to face one another. Spain saw off Germany, France and England on their way to the final, after having beaten Italy in the group; England beat the Netherlands and Switzerland (which had knocked out Italy). Both teams can say they faced at least some serious opposition, even if it's true that England made heavier work of facing easier opponents.
The point of all this is, England (or any other big team) can only be said to under-achieve if they don't reach the quarterfinals. After that point, it comes down, as I said, to a whole bunch of variables on the day, which even the most detail-oriented managers can't really account for. So while England should be wistful about what might have been, the fact is they showed themselves to be one of the two best teams in the continent, and should use that as a springboard for future tournaments.
The other thing I've been considering in this tournament has been the number of participants. This is kind of related to the previous point about under-achievement. By its nature, a larger tournament features a larger number of worse teams, but this year in particular, I feel like there were very few teams that were only there to make up the numbers. The evidence for this is that only Poland found itself eliminated after the first two matches, whereas the tournaments that have 16 or 32 participants have many more teams crashing out that early.
Some pundits have suggested that certain games at Euro 2024 were proof that the tournament should go back to only eight teams, never mind 16, but that obscures the runs that Georgia and Turkey went on this year. Not only did they play out a supremely entertaining game among themselves, but both got to the knockouts, and Turkey were clearly good enough to beat an Austrian team that held its own against the Dutch and the French in the group.
If the World Cup and the Euros are festivals of football, it makes sense to invite more teams to enjoy the party. A good run, like Georgia this year or Iceland in 2016, is like a once-in-a-lifetime pleasure for those countries' fans (and it doesn't matter if there aren't many of them), and also nets them money that they wouldn't have access to if they didn't qualify.
Given that the Champions League (as I bang on about ad nauseam) is increasingly the province of a few clubs from just four countries, and in practice really only Spain and England, it's good to see that the Euros are going in the other direction and sharing the wealth a bit, even if the winners still usually come from the same pool of Spain, Germany, France or Italy. Though even here, Portugal, Greece, Denmark and others show how a less accomplished team can put together a decent run.
All this is to say, I'm filled with my customary wistfulness at the end of a tournament. At some level, the quality of the play, or how far Italy gets, is kind of beside the point (though I'd have been in a hell of a better mood if Italy had won today!). The main thing is getting up early to catch ridiculous matches that I wouldn't normally cross the street for; figuring out whose house to watch the big games at, or whether to go to the pub; and the constant roasting between me and my friends who support other teams.
Euro 2024 is now consigned to the ages. It might have featured the most embarrassing Italy performance since 2008, but it was great while it lasted. And now I can look forward to World Cup 2026, which will be here on home soil, and which will hopefully feature Italy for the first time in a generation.
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