The emperor has no clothes
Football has been stripped of its enjoyment value
The European Championship, friends, has been boring. We must not say so. After all, Spain sparkled, Lamine Yamal shone and we ourselves yearned for good matches. Moreover, as a boy I thought confessing to boredom with soccer betrayed a lack of inner sophistication.
I conclude now that I have no inner sophistication because the Euros bore me. The games bore me, the teams, especially ones with great stars playing badly, bore me. The commentators bore me, with their plights and gripes as bad as Achilles tendon injuries.
Thank God for the dream song of hurling. Last Sunday’s All-Ireland semi-final between Cork and Limerick was an incredibly exciting contest between two teams displaying extraordinary skill. The pace was unrelenting, the intensity unabated, the entertainment unbeatable, the tension at times almost unbearable.
That game, and others in this year’s hurling championship, have been so much better than anything in the Euros, comparing them almost seems unfair. But the coincidence of the competitions makes comparison unavoidable. (It’s also hard to avoid noting that only one of them was broadcast in full for free.)
Goals per game ratios are not infallible measures of worth, but they’re a useful yardstick. This Euros tournament ranks sixth out of seven since 2000.
It may seem unbelievable that a sport played in one small corner of Europe provided better entertainment than the world’s most popular game. But anyone who watched both Cork-Limerick and even the most exciting contest in the Euros couldn’t deny the former was objectively better by a large distance.
Americans are mocked for not fully embracing the beautiful game. Why should they when American football and basketball are much more enjoyable spectacles?
This desire to be entertained is sometimes seen as a weakness in the American character. But isn’t entertainment the point of spectator sport? One objection to the big American sports is that there are too many breaks. Yet the European Championship games contained long spells which might as well have been breaks.
When the time out ends or the new set of downs begins, something exciting will happen. Bad soccer matches by contrast are almost surreally uneventful.
Turn away for a second in Croke Park last weekend and another attack would be underway when you looked back. Something is always happening in hurling. More goes on in 10 minutes at Croke Park, Semple Stadium or Páirc Uí Chaoimh than in 120 at Frankfurt, Hamburg and Dusseldorf.
Euro 2024 has been poor by the standards of its own sport too. The disappointment has been all the greater because the last World Cup was such a classic. Ironically, the much-maligned winter scheduling may have helped. Players were fresh rather than jaded after a long season. A shroud of exhaustion enveloped many of this year’s games, as though teams were playing with tired blood.
The poverty of this renewal was most horribly illustrated by the France-Portugal quarter-final when two sides packed with world-class players barely mustered an exciting moment between them. France-Belgium, Portugal-Slovenia, England-Switzerland, England-Slovenia and Ukraine-Belgium among others also belong in the chamber of horrors.
France, whose array of attacking talent managed just four goals from six games, two of them own goals and one a penalty, may have been the emblematic team of a tournament replete with underachievement.
England, poor for five consecutive games before finding form in the semi-final, weren’t much better. Their presence in the final says everything about the underwhelming nature of the tournament. Perhaps, like the Portugal team who won the ropey 2016 championships, they’ll stumble over the line tonight.
That’d be an injustice to Spain, without whom the whole affair would have been sorely lacking in quality. The adventurous Austrians, gutsy Georgians and thrilling Turks were as diverting as Belgium, Portugal, Italy and Croatia were disappointing.
It goes against the grain to regard a championship attended by so much big-money hype and watched by so many people as a disappointment. But if such things were a measure of worth, Taylor Swift would be greater than Billie Holiday and Joni Mitchell.
The tournament felt like one of those blockbuster movies marketed as a must watch whose big money soullessness just leaves the audience feeling empty. Perhaps that’s where soccer is now. The Premier League is almost invariably won by the fraudulent conspiracy which is Manchester City.
The Champions League seems to fizzle out rather than come to a climax when we reach the final. Its last six deciders have seen four 1-0 wins and two 2-0 victories. None of the games have been memorable. The amount of money spent and the surrounding PR campaigns don’t compensate for the lack of drama. Almost every Super Bowl and most All-Ireland finals are better than that year’s Champions League final.
Kylian Mbappe cut the sorriest figure of all. Electrifying in Qatar, he lumbered around Germany as though carrying his reputation on his back. Someone like Mbappe lives a kind of Hollywood existence. The ability which made him great is almost obscured by a blizzard of advertising, constant scrutiny and speculation about his life.
Is it any wonder that he, like Jude Bellingham, Eduardo Camavinga and others, sometimes seemed to be acting the role of a superstar in a TV ad rather than playing football? Cristiano Ronaldo’s entire tournament was more showbiz than sport.
The sublime Yamal has the world at his feet. How long before he’s ground down by the demands of modern sporting celebrity? Lionel Messi flew past such snares with ease, but the environment is more demanding now.
Euro 2024 was a global entertainment phenomenon which wasn’t entertaining. Those who claim otherwise sound strangely familiar, like the dwindling band who make excuses for modern Gaelic football.
Euro 2024, it turns out, was grimly compelling. After the notoriously negative 1980 tournament, the great Argentinian manager Cesar Luis Menotti scoffed, “Europa 80? They should have called it Europa 80 per cent, 80 per cent rubbish.” In Euro 2024, only 20 to 24 per cent of the games have been any good.
If this squib was any damper, it would have drowned.