Why England have more at stake in Euro 2024 final than Spain

BERLIN — Come Sunday night, it will be done. Spain‘s collection of wonderkids, comeback kids and kids-at-heart, under the watchful eye of everyone’s favorite substitute teacher, coach Luis de la Fuente, will have delivered the country Euro 2024, a European crown for three out of the past five tournaments.

Or England, having already made the transition from tragicomic self-destructors to nearly men (this is their second straight Euro final, and they also reached the World Cup semifinals in 2018) will take that final step into the history books and win a major tournament, something they haven’t achieved since 1966 (and even that one, to most, came with an asterisk.)

Either way, there will be an air of finality to it and international football will largely go back on the cupboard shelf until 2026 and the three-host, 48-country extravaganza of the World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada. The cycle of top-end club football is relentless: the first qualifying round of the 2024-25 Champions League was played last week; the game’s heavyweights are packing for their summer tours; and already, outside of the two finalists’ countries, transfer stories are pushing the Euros to the margins.

Yet Euro 2024 leaves a mark on all who were part of it, as players or fans. After Qatar 2022, COVID-restricted Euro 2020 and Russia 2018, this was the first major tournament in a long time that felt accessible, both geographically — for most fans it was a train ride or short flight away — and practically, with most German cities being diverse and welcoming multicultural, multilingual hubs, with price points to suit all. Indeed, you saw supporters mixing on the cobblestones of Sachsenhausen in Frankfurt and the 70,000 strong Fan-mile by Berlin’s Brandenburger Tor: not just different jerseys, but rich and poor, young and old, drunk and sober, inked-up and strait-laced. It felt as if it belonged to all.

Which sounds corny, until you realize the recent history of the backdrop for today’s final, Berlin. A city that, as the local saying goes, “is always becoming, never being” in the sense that it is always evolving and mutating, going back to when seven distinct villages grew together into one and, somehow, managed to maintain their distinct identities two centuries later. Today, a majority of Berliners aren’t native-born to the city, but that doesn’t make you any less a Berliner, as John F. Kennedy realized more than half a century ago.

This is a city that understands its role in the world as the countercultural capital of Europe but also faces its dark past on a daily basis, from the World War II era (examples such as the Schwerbelastungskörper are still standing) to the Berlin Wall that cleaved it in half. Rather than erasing the past, they’ve chosen to contextualize it, in the hope that the words “never again” will stay as reality.

But back to the football.

The legacy of what happens on Sunday will carry a country for the next 24 months, and it will do so for different reasons.

For England, it will be the end of a wait that feels like a curse: how does the country that invented the game, that is home to the strongest league in the world, that packs stadiums week in and week out, fail to punch its weight?

For Spain, the validation of an entire footballing ecosystem that extends into the women’s game (they won the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand last year) and that, unlike in the past, isn’t reliant on their two club giants — Barcelona and Real Madrid — to drive their success.

De la Fuente is a Spanish FA member who coached youth teams for more than a decade and is entirely unconnected to Spain’s club elite. And, of course, just two of the likely starting XI on Sunday play for one of the two Spanish superclubs. When Spain were last in a final, in 2012, it was 10 of 11.

Conventional wisdom has it that form matters more than pedigree in these short knockout tournaments. If that’s the case, there’s no contest. Spain have won five of their six games without needing extra time. England have won just two in 90 minutes, and they needed a 90th-minute winner against Netherlands. If this were a league format, Spain would have 16 points from six games and be a whopping six points clear of England.

Spain have also faced tougher opposition, beating defending champions Italy, hosts Germany, and France, the most gifted team in the competition and runners-up at the most recent World Cup. England’s path has been much smoother, and, even then, they drew with Denmark and Slovenia and needed a stoppage-time goal against Slovakia to get to extra time, penalties against Switzerland and a controversial spot kick against the Dutch.

Then, there’s the eye test, and here it gets even grimmer for Gareth Southgate’s crew. Apart from the first half against Netherlands (which was followed by a turgid second 45 minutes), England simply haven’t played well. It’s not just Southgate’s conservatism and determination to play in transition. That’s a strategy like any other. It’s that they haven’t executed it well at all: shaky defensively and relying on individual moments to nick goals at the other end.

Spain, by contrast, have been attacking, entertaining and largely in control of every game they’ve played, bar some spells against Germany and France.

But there’s a lot of truth to the cliché that it doesn’t matter how you get to the final, it matters what you do once you’re there. And that’s why Spain can’t be considered overwhelming favorites.

The old trope of defending in numbers and waiting for one of your individual match-winners to do something special works in one-off games because this a low-scoring sport. England, for all the ugly performances seen thus far, are resilient, and they have an array of individuals who can turn games in an instant: from Harry Kane to Jude Bellingham, from Phil Foden to Bukayo Saka, from Cole Palmer to, as the Dutch found out, Ollie Watkins. It’s not pretty; it means England — unlike Spain — are less than the sum of their parts; and, if this were a league campaign, you would definitely take De la Fuente’s Reds over Southgate’s Three Lions. But it’s not.

Southgate knows this, and De la Fuente does too. Coaching a national side is an entirely different animal from doing so in the club game. Guys don’t go home to their families after work, they don’t sleep in their own beds, they don’t have distractions. They are thrown together for five weeks with 25 other guys with a single mission. It’s part special ops, part collective pilgrimage, part reality show with cameras (traditional and social) and audiences of tens of millions watching your every move.

How a coach manages his players, his internal and external messaging, the vibe and mood in the camp … all of this takes on an outsized importance.

And on this front, you have to give credit to both managers. De la Fuente has ridden the fact that expectations were low for this Spain side. Fewer big names than in the past (and some of them, like Pedri, coming off injury-hampered seasons), two naturalized French centre-backs — Robin Le Normand and Aymeric Laporte — with the latter playing in Saudi Arabia, a centre-forward who divides opinion (Álvaro Morata) and is trying to be moved on by his club (Atlético Madrid), and a starting right-winger who doesn’t turn 17 until the day before the final (Lamine Yamal).

Plus, there’s De la Fuente himself, a coach most fans couldn’t pick out of a crowd until he got the top job. But he has the great merit of weaving together a unit, of being positive without grandstanding (an accusation that might have been levelled at his predecessor, Luis Enrique, now coach of Paris Saint-Germain), of insulating the young and less experienced — such as Yamal and Nico Williams. He has also created a positive feedback loop with media and fans back home, who for once have put their obsession with Madrid and Barcelona to one side to rally around their national team. Heck, they’re even buying Spain Yamal shirts rather than Barca ones, which is telling.

Southgate, who has been in charge for eight years, has already had the great merit of making England likeable and creating an environment free of the polemics and in-fighting of yesteryear. He’s been open and honest with media and fans, and they have repaid him with support, to a point, although Southgate was harangued by the media and showered with cups of beer after the disappointing draw against Slovenia.

He’s been the lightning rod for criticism and protective of his players. That — and the fact that, in terms of results at major tournaments, he’s the most successful England manager of all time — has helped him past feeling often like a chef blessed with the greatest of gourmet ingredients who simply nukes everything in the microwave, slaps it on the plate and says “Dinner’s ready!”

But there’s only so much of that intangible, off-the-pitch, feel-good stuff that will fly. And there is no escaping the fact that his star-studded England side are the overdogs looking for international validation. Just as his conscious method — based largely on what he thinks worked for Didier Deschamps and France — of safety-first football (he’s part fire marshal, part Ned Flanders) will be fully vindicated only if England finally win a trophy.

You’d struggle to find a more iconic backdrop for this clash than Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, this century-old venue where Jesse Owens broke records and Zinedine Zidane, in his final game, head-butted his way into (temporary) infamy.

Berliners asked themselves what to do with it. At one point, some wanted it razed to the ground. Some wanted it to be allowed to decay, like the Colosseum in Rome. Instead, it was renovated, in the belief that you can’t escape history but you can change its path — for the better — going forward.

England, as a football nation, is more encumbered by history than Spain, both in this specific tournament, when the English have played really poorly, and in their history, with the six decades of international disappointment. It’s a test not just for the team but for the whole Southgate approach and ethos. But they’ll have a chance to write their own history Sunday. As for Spain, they are playing with house money: come what may, their Euros is already a success and they can look to the future with confidence.