Personnel castling since application
The DFB is urgently looking for the EM euphoria to be destroyed
November 29, 2023, 12:31 p.m
When the DFB submitted its application for the 2024 European Championship ten years ago, there was still football euphoria in Germany. But a lot has changed since then: the DFB team is collapsing, the association is wearing out a whole series of presidents. A new “summer fairy tale” is far away.
On September 27, 2018, Reinhard Grindel celebrated the German Football Association (DFB) – and above all himself. “I fought. But not for myself, but for the DFB. For the big goal of achieving success with the 2024 European Championship “to reach German football,” the then DFB President cheered on the day the finals were awarded to Germany. Six months later he had to resign.
The fact that four presidents and two interim bosses have been or are at the helm of the DFB since the application was announced on October 24, 2013 says everything about the state of the largest individual sports association in the world. Nevertheless, in the end the award was a clear matter. The vote of the Executive Committee of the European Football Union (UEFA) was 12:4, with one abstention, and the competitor from Turkey had no chance.
The names of the well-wishers from politicians who are no longer in office show how long ago the whole thing happened. “We are looking forward to exciting games at the European Championships and to visiting fans from all over Europe,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel. “This will be the opportunity to show what we stand for in Germany: for cosmopolitanism and tolerance, for freedom and respect,” said Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
Five years from interest to award
In the run-up to the vote, UEFA gave the German application the better rating in its evaluation report. People quickly started talking about “Summer Fairy Tale 2.0” – 18 years after the 2006 World Cup. However, the path to the second European Championship finals on German soil after 1988 was not that easy.
After the then DFB President Wolfgang Niersbach expressed the association’s interest at the Bundestag in Nuremberg in October 2013, the DFB withdrew from the race for the final round of the pan-European European Championship planned for 2020 a year later. By avoiding the battle vote against London, the chances of 2024 should be increased.
Another year later, Niersbach had to resign in the wake of the Summer Fairy Tale affair. Niersbach’s successor Grindel proclaimed the 2024 European Championships to be a “lighthouse project”. In January 2017, the DFB executive committee officially decided on the application, and Turkey followed suit a month later. At the end of 2017, Philipp Lahm joined as EM ambassador.
The final phase of the application started on April 24, 2018, when the DFB submitted its 868-page application to UEFA, followed two days later by Turkey’s documents. In order to give its application further impetus, the DFB announced on August 16, 2018 that Lahm would take over the position of tournament director if the contract was accepted. Shortly afterwards it was time to celebrate.
The euphoria back then has evaporated
However, many of the hopes associated with the award were not fulfilled. There was no calm in the crisis-stricken DFB, the national team is still on the ground, and there is hardly any sign of euphoria in the country six months before the tournament (June 14th to July 14th).
Grindel had imagined it very differently when the DFB employees celebrated the success with warm sausages and draft beer the day after the award at the association’s then headquarters in Frankfurt am Main: “This is a really big day for top-level and grassroots football in Germany.” Around five years later, the reality looks different. With the group draw this Saturday (5.45 p.m./RTL and in the ntv.de live ticker) However, the hot phase of the tournament is now slowly beginning.