In front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the street was covered in artificial grass and a series of giant goals were erected. On Hamburg’s seafront, two dozen shipping containers have been painted in the colors of the competing countries. A part of the Leipzig Zoo has been given over for a program of cultural events, although probably not the tiger part.
Across Germany, flags are being flown, marketing plans are being finalized and anything bearing the logo of anything other than one of UEFA’s official sponsors is being unceremoniously hidden from view. After six years of planning, the European soccer championship, Euro 2024, is just one week away. The teams will begin arriving imminently. Fans, hundreds of thousands, will follow closely.
Meanwhile, for the rest of Europe, these are the glorious, hazy days before the start of carnival: a time full of bunting and sticker albums, moving television montages, speculative posters and sweet nostalgia. Or, rather, they should be, because it’s hard not to suspect that everyone is going through the motions.
It’s not that there isn’t appetite for a tournament traditionally overshadowed only by the World Cup. But it’s definitely of the muted variety. All the emotions normally associated with one of football’s masterpieces – hope, excitement, fear, wonder at how England will sabotage themselves – have been eclipsed by something else, something closer to boredom.
The most immediate explanation for why this could happen probably lies in the football calendar, which has been out of sync for the past four years. The men’s World Cup ended just 18 months ago. The last men’s European Championship was three years ago, not four. The game’s biological clock has been messed up. It’s as if sport as a whole is suffering from jet lag.
Much, but not all, of that can be attributed to football’s attempts to make up for lost time during the coronavirus pandemic. There has been a near-constant stream of football since that unwanted break in 2020. The extent to which this has exhausted the players is well documented, but the same logic applies to the fans as well. The more games there are, the less they seem to matter.
(This, admittedly, is an issue affecting the Copa América, which also starts this month. Between 2011 and 2020, the Copa América seemed to take place almost constantly. They never stopped playing the Copa América. After a while, it became It’s hard to worry too much about it unless, presumably, your nation was involved, and even then it was a stretch).
But there is a more immediate factor in football’s summer malaise, one that was laid bare on Tuesday, when The Times of London published details of Manchester City’s long-awaited legal action against the Premier League, a battle that has The potential – and this is not an exaggeration – to change the most popular sports league in the world beyond recognition.
City’s main objective, as stated in 165 pages of court documents that are both serious and absurd, is to abolish the league’s rules on transactions between associated parties, the catchy name given to sponsorship deals entered into by clubs with companies linked to their owners.
The city maintains that those companies should be able to pay whatever they want for such agreements, rather than something close to the market rate. The current rules, which require the latter, are anti-competitive, the club’s lawyers say, and if they are not lifted City will have no choice but to stop funding its women’s team and its community work. If that sounds like an overt threat, that’s because it is.
The potential consequences of what appears to be a technically unpleasant case could be profound. If Manchester City manage to overturn the rules, it would mark the end of anything close to cost controls in the Premier League. That would give the club (and Newcastle, who like City are backed by what is in effect a nation-state agency) free rein to pump as much money into their coffers as they want.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, of course, City have dressed this up in populist rhetoric about toppling a hated and self-serving elite, and added a healthy dose of flawed libertarian economics. The reality is different: City’s objective is the abolition of any spectrum of competition.
Being able and willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a football team without worrying about losses would be a prerequisite for success. Such an environment would most likely make the Premier League a spectacularly unattractive investment for anyone except other nation states. At least some of the American owners currently populating the league would likely have no choice but to resign.
Even if the case fails, the outlook is not much brighter. Later this year, City is scheduled to finally face a hearing on the 115 charges it faces for violating some of the league’s financial rules.
Now he has not only questioned the legality of at least some of the rules under which he will be tried, but he has made it abundantly clear that everything else is also open to question. It’s not that City want to prove their innocence of the charges. He wants to burn down the entire building that allowed him to be accused in the first place.
There is no obvious route to a smooth return to the Premier League from here. The reality of the league now is that it contains at least one team – its best team – that wants to abolish not only the rules but also the mechanism for formulating them. Legal documents describe the way the Premier League is run as a “tyranny of the majority”. (In this case, it seems to be synonymous with “democracy”). The city’s goal seems to be to turn it into a much more traditional form of tyranny.
But while the stakes are unquestionably high, the timing of the legal developments (a couple of weeks before the European Championships) also seemed significant. International football is not as successful as its club equivalent. The big tournaments are not, as they once were, a showcase of the game in its highest form, a place to see what the future will be like.
The appeal of the international game is precisely that it is different: a break from the endless hustle and bustle of the club game, a change in tone and approach and, to some extent, pace. It’s a release valve for the emotional pressure that builds up over a long, arduous season. At its most basic, it gives everyone someone different to reprimand.
However, as the (appropriately) intense coverage of the Premier League’s most pressing existential fight has shown, the idea of a break from club football is anathema. Of course, this is not intentional: the Premier League did not decide to collapse in June on purpose, simply because fans’ eyes were directed elsewhere.
Rather, it is a function of how absorbing the club game has become, of how supporting a team no longer appears to be a passive, occasional leisure activity, but rather an active, full-time job, one that demands constant attention and performance. public. , one that is inextricably intertwined with your own sense of self.
In that scenario, a major tournament can never capture the imagination because the club season never ends, not really. There’s always another managerial appointment, another player transfer, another attempt to reshape the league’s rules to make them meet your very personal definition of fair.
That’s not to say, of course, that euro fever won’t sweep the continent at some point in the next four weeks. By the time the final stages arrive, at least eight countries will be fully committed. But even as the prospect of glory draws ever closer, there will be a hum, a background noise, an inescapable reminder that real life goes on, that summer is ending, that this is not the part of the game that really matters.