VShe is a Euro who, like Ulysses, will have made great trips. Too many, probably, and fears were justified about these journeys from London to Baku, from Copenhagen to Seville, at the end of a singular and exhausting season.
The competition started with other handicaps. The field expanded to 24 participants in 2016 involves a group stage which eliminates only eight of them and dilutes the sporting stake, or reduces it to tedious calculations on the “best third” or the distribution of the final table.
The scattering of this pan-European tournament in eleven cities by Michel Platini, in addition to the long trips imposed on teams and supporters, also compromised the festive aspect specific to the concentration in a single country of supporters and their joyful folklore, as in France five years ago.
With the pandemic, the bad idea had become worse, the Euro offering epidemiologists a field of study of the contagion they would have done without. At least the return – partial but gratifying – of the public in the stands has allowed us to reconnect with a certain normality, that of a sport that is no longer much in empty stadiums.
The joys of uncertainty
The conditions were therefore met for this Euro with an uncertain vintage to endorse the crisis of a football of selections devalued and marginalized by the hegemony of club football, and to take on a twilight hue before a 2022 World Cup in Qatar already placed under a unflattering day.
And then the magic of the final stages worked. Certainly, the series injuries and the forms of exhausted players have reminded us that the calendars of the European elite must be profoundly reformed. But all these imponderables have probably returned to football that uncertainty that suits it so well and misses it so much.
As often, many stars have not shone enough, from Kylian Mbappé to Cristiano Ronaldo. Those who have evolved to the expected level, Luka Modric or Paul Pogba, were not enough to save their teams. The last word has gone to the teams, precisely those who form a body and those who have a game plan – a performance in the current conditions of preparation for the selections.
Despite the inevitable blows of fate and some bias (matches played at home for several selections, differences in days of rest and length of trips), the Euro rewarded various varieties of merit: the ideas of Spain and of Italy, the collective strength of Switzerland or Denmark, the flame of England …
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