Why Europe is more dominant than ever before in world football â The Athletic Around the last time England came close to winning the European Championship, in 1996, there was a prevailing school of thought among intelligent football observers that they needed to hurry up and earn a trophy soon because time was running out for them.
Time was running out, you see, because there were new forces emerging in world football.
Cameroon had reached the 1990 World Cup quarter-finals, and Nigeria winning Olympic gold just over a month after Gareth Southgate missed his penalty further suggested African football was coming of age.
The successful hosting of a World Cup by the US in 1994 would supposedly kickstart a soccer obsession there, and within 20 years theyâd dominate the game like they had come to dominate the Olympic Games.
Japan and South Koreaâs co-hosting of the same tournament in 2002 was expected to do something similar, and Australia, who punch above their weight in every other sport they take seriously, were gradually starting to produce Premier League-quality players on a regular basis.
In other words, England were still broadly at the top table of world football (as one of only six countries to have won the World Cup at the time, and having reached two major tournament semi-finals in the 1990s) but their seat was far from guaranteed.
And roughly 15 years later, that prediction felt like it was becoming a reality.
The US were producing excellent players and were now no strangers to the knockout phase of World Cups. Japan, Australia and Mexico all had outstanding generations of talent, winning continental tournaments and going into World Cups with a chance of achieving something historic.
Ghana in 2010 were surely the best African side yet seen at a World Cup, cruelly denied a semi-finals place by Luis Suarezâs cynical handball. In South America, Chile were the most exciting side, Suarezâs Uruguay the most effective and Colombia the emerging force.
But today, it feels like the majority of those countries have faded.
There is little sign of further African progress. The US men, amazingly, failed to qualify for the World Cup in Russia that, 20 years previously, many might have pinpointed as one they might have been capable of winning. They have their best-ever generation of talent coming through, but converting talent into the kind of success their womenâs team enjoy isnât always easy.
Only one Asian side has made the knockout stage of the last two World Cups combined, with Japan beaten by Belgium in the last 16 three years ago. At that same tournament, no African team progressed beyond the group stage for the first time since 1982. Australiaâs golden generation has been and gone, and the next one isnât anywhere near as talented. The South American trio of Chile, Uruguay and Colombia are in the same boat, with the Copa America final last weekend being contested by Brazil and Argentina, the continentâs traditional âbig twoâ.
Europe is now more dominant than ever before.
At World Cup 2018, it provided six of the quarter-finalists, and all four semi-finalists.
And this summerâs Euros have simply underlined its dominance further.
That might sound ludicrous â this is a Europe-only tournament, so of course the winners will be European. But the key is the continentâs strength in depth. The four semi-finalists this time (Italy, England, Spain, Denmark) were completely different from the four at the previous European Championship in 2016 (Portugal, France, Wales, Germany). Include semi-finalists from World Cup 2018 and you also have Croatia and Belgium. Ten different European nations among the last 12 semi-finalists at the three most recent playings of those two tournaments, with only France and England reaching that stage twice.
The peculiar thing is that, in a different way, Europe has never been less dominant.
It hosted nine of the first 16 World Cups up until France 1998, but now FIFA is sharing them out around the world as never before. Russia, itself only on the periphery of Europe, will be the tournamentâs only UEFA host nation between Germany in 2006 and, at the earliest, the 2030 finals.
In terms of World Cup places, Europe traditionally contributed just over half of the teams at the finals.
At Italia 1990 it was 58 per cent, for example, but that figure has dropped to 41 per cent of places for next yearâs World Cup. After Qatar 2022, the World Cup finals field will expand by another 16 teams â but Europe will only get three of those additional spots. It will then contribute only 33 per cent of World Cup finals sides. The World Cup must balance quality with geographic spread, of course, but Europe might feel a little hard done by, considering its remarkable strength in depth.
Indeed, itâs worth considering whether, to solve the logistical awkwardness of a 24-team European Championship, one solution might be expanding to 32 sides. By the ranking formula UEFA used for seeding Euro 2020, this would mean adding Serbia, Slovenia, Republic of Ireland, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Norway, Kosovo and Greece to the party.
Itâs doubtful any of those sides would be out of their depth â Norway, with Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard, might actually be rather good â and all are, on paper, stronger than the North Macedonia side who qualified for Euro 2020 from Nations League D. Any expansion along these lines would surely prompt a complete change to the qualifying format which would largely be redundant, and might be swallowed up entirely by the Nations League.
This summerâs Euros have widely been hailed as a great tournament. If thereâs one peculiar lesson to be learned, itâs that to have a great tournament, you donât actually need any truly exceptional sides nor the continentâs elite players playing at their peak.
Champions Italy were a good side rather than a truly great one. And when their goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarummaâs name flashed up as the player of the tournament, it came as a surprise. However, then you considered that not only had he made a couple of crucial penalty saves in the shootout which decided the final but it wasnât obvious who was being scandalously overlooked with him getting the award.
There was also notable difference between the nature of England vs Italy in the European Championship final, and Argentina vs Brazil in the Copa America final less than 24 hours earlier. The former felt like two cohesive teams trying to outplay each other, the latter was billed as superstar versus superstar, Lionel Messi vs Neymar, No 10 versus No 10.
The quality throughout Euro 2020 was distributed evenly. And this is where international football is streets ahead of club football. It canât compete in terms of outright technical and tactical quality, but its competitiveness and unpredictability is glorious.
At club level, a proportion of global football fans are now increasingly concentrated on supporting a handful of elite superclubs who are literally threatening to overthrow the current system. Perhaps a majority of club football supporters now do genuinely want the likes of Barcelona, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain winning 5-0 every week, with Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappe scoring hat-tricks aplenty.
But outright quality isnât enough.
These Euros reminded us of two of the key ingredients for enjoyable football: You need supporters in the ground to create an atmosphere, and you need competitive balance.
When you have those two concepts, nothing else in the world compares to football.