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It is two weeks until the draw for Euro 2020, all glitz and stardust in an oversized exhibition center in Bucharest, Romania. By Thursday night, 10 teams had qualified, including Belgium, Italy, Spain, England and France. Germany and the Netherlands were expected to join them soon enough, and most likely Portugal and Croatia, too.
Beyond that, it is anybody’s guess. If you can understand all of the permutations, all of the different routes into the tournament, the qualifying and the playoffs and the Nations League route, then you have my undying admiration.
It is easy to be cynical about international soccer. It is almost impossible not to resent its seemingly constant intrusions into the club season, those lacunas that appear in September, October and November, resented by managers and hardly celebrated by fans, matches that serve only to interrupt the flow of the nascent domestic campaign.
And it is especially easy in Europe, at this point, because the qualifying process for next summer’s European Championships is so long and unwieldy and complex. (In that way, it mirrors the tournament, which will be held across Europe next summer, rather than in a single nation, and is therefore an unholy logistical mess for all concerned.)
At times, it feels pointless, too: the major countries will make it, because they always make it, and because even if they don’t make it, they all appear to have an endless supply of second chances. Trying to establish who might join them — for the right to be knocked out in the group stages — is a fiendish Sudoku, and one that will have no ultimate bearing on the result of the tournament.
But all of that cynicism essays from a position of privilege. There is a tendency to tilt all soccer coverage — perhaps all sports coverage — toward the powerful, the established, the elite. Just as we see the Premier League through the eyes of the Big Six, or La Liga as the stage on which the Barcelona-Real Madrid rivalry is played out, or the Bundesliga as a competition that is won or lost by Bayern Munich, we look at international soccer through the prism of the larger nations, the bigger markets, the famous names.
There is, though, another perspective, one in which international soccer is a blessing, rather than a burden. On Friday night, Finland hosted Liechtenstein in Helsinki. A win would be enough to send the Finns to the Euros. (For certain; I’ve checked.)
Finland has excelled in motor sports, in hockey, in various things that involve skis, and in a number of sports it has invented itself for no apparent reason. It had never, though — at least not until Friday night’s 3-0 victory — qualified for a major soccer tournament. “All the other things in our sports we have managed to do,” Marco Casagrande, the general secretary of the Football Association of Finland, had told The Associated Press before the match. “But this is something that is still separating us from being a real sports country.”
Though much of the credit for that must go to Finland’s coach, Markku Kanerva, and his players — not quite as illustrious as the country’s greatest ever team, the late 1990s generation of Sami Hyypia and Jari Litmanen, but no plucky amateurs, either — some of it should go to UEFA, too.
There have always been underdogs qualifying for tournaments, of course, but UEFA’s decision to expand its flagship championships to 24 teams from 16 — Euro 2016 was the first extended version — seems to have encouraged those who had all but lost hope of reaching a major finals. Perhaps there was a time when countries of that size saw international soccer as boring and pointless too, though not because they won all of the time; quite the opposite. It was a closed shop. Now, expansion has given the impression that it is very much open.
That comes at a price, of course: the major countries must go through a qualifying process that is a foregone conclusion, and everyone else gets a set of fallbacks that make predicting who will actually be in the tournament essentially impossible until the very last minute.
But it is a price worth paying, surely, traveling this long road, if at the end of it, someone, somewhere — in this case, Finland — gets to enjoy a moment like this.
A Coup, and a Turning Point
We mentioned a few weeks ago that Sam Kerr, the Australia captain and a genuine superstar, might be considering a move to Europe. Earlier this week, Chelsea confirmed her arrival, in a deal that will almost certainly make Kerr the highest-paid player in the Women’s Super League.
It is a transfer of genuine significance: partly, as previously discussed, because it signifies a power shift away from the United States and toward the grand old clubs of Europe. But partly, too, because it will be interesting to see how much of a draw a player of Kerr’s profile is.
It is too simplistic, really, to believe that there will be a significant uptick in attendances just to see Kerr play; should her presence turn Chelsea into (even more of) a box-office team, then that might do the trick. And if that’s the case, soccer clubs being the same regardless of gender or location, expect more English teams to make a play for big names from across the Atlantic.
Peerless in Seattle
I have an oversight to amend. As Russell Champa emailed to point out, last week’s newsletter contained no mention of the M.L.S. Cup final. This was not out of lack of respect for the American game — as Russell suspected — but because there were other issues pressing for my attention. Apologies: Let’s make up for it now.
Seattle against Toronto was both an unpredictable final — this year seemed set for a meeting between Los Angeles F.C., the year’s standout team, and Atlanta, the reigning champion — and an entirely predictable one: Seattle and Toronto have met, after all, in three of the last four finals.
Both, I think, offer reasons for cheer. The former because it is a reminder that sports is not meant to follow a formula; the latter because, while immediate success for expansion teams might offer M.L.S. a short-term boost (particularly in major markets), it is not especially healthy if it becomes a pattern. What would it say of the league if all a team needed to win it was a couple of years’ practice?
As M.L.S. continues to expand, there has to be something to shoot for, a standard to live up to. A revolution needs something to overturn. And there has to be an example to follow, and it’s hard to think of a better one than Seattle: not just for the way the team is run, but the crowds it attracts, and the bond it has with its place, too.
In Case You Missed It
Part of the reason the M.L.S. Cup final passed me by last week, of course, was that there was quite a big game in England: Liverpool beat Manchester City, 3-1, extending its lead in the Premier League to eight points (and nine over City). That’s not bad, given that there is still a small — but significant and vocal — section of soccer’s commentariat that believes Jürgen Klopp’s success is down to the fact that he hugs his players. It isn’t. This Liverpool team is a triumph of coaching.
So is City, of course, and I spent the week before that game investigating what that means for English soccer as a whole. When Pep Guardiola arrived in England, there was a genuine sense of excitement that he would change the game here forever — we would reset our calendars so that 2016 was Year Zero, and everything was either Before Pep or After Pep — but the picture is more complex, and I think more interesting, than that.
Correspondence
Not a lighthearted start this week: Shane Thomas asks if the rise of Matteo Salvini is a “contributory factor” to Italy’s plague of racist abuse in stadiums. “If we say that the narrative around Brexit has emboldened some to be racist in British stadiums, wouldn’t a similar thing be true for Italy?”
Absolutely, Shane, though the issue of racism, and the ultras who perpetrate it, in Italy dates back further than Salvini. Lazio and Verona — where Mario Balotelli was abused recently — have a long history of it (though they are, sadly, not alone). A change in public rhetoric does, of course, have an impact, emboldening those who wish to spread their hate, and creating a climate in which resistance to it is more difficult.
Michael Coffin, meanwhile, makes a claim for Bournemouth as the team that has spent the longest in any one division: Between 1923 and 1970, he wrote, Bournemouth spent 47 consecutive years in English soccer’s third tier. I will promise you, Michael, that I will have a definitive answer on this for you next week, once I have combed through the tables.
That’s all for this week. I hope you can all endure the international break: take solace from the fact that this is it until February. I’m on Twitter, of course, and occasionally Instagram. Keep the questions coming to askrory@nytimes.com, and spread the word to your loved ones here.
Have a great weekend.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
