20 Thoughts on the First Round of Euro 2024
Because I wanted to have productive outcomes of my brain turning into a soccer ball.
![Serbian football coach Dragan Stojkovic Piski, a white man with graying hair and a white button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, sitting with slumped shoulders by the side of the soccer field. Serbian football coach Dragan Stojkovic Piski, a white man with graying hair and a white button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, sitting with slumped shoulders by the side of the soccer field.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F26eff084-a4a1-44e9-b47e-97d81a6eda00_737x414.webp)
I decided to boycott men’s soccer last year, after the contrast between the multimillion dollar business of men’s football and the fact that in women’s soccer, the players are so little valued Luis Rubiales could plant one on Jeni Hermoso during the World Cup final, got to be too much for me. I told myself I would only watch women’s soccer from now on but wound up falling out of sports overall, the rhythm of my daily life trampling over any TV time really.
But when the Euros start, I can’t stay away. Unlike the club soccer fans that moan about international breaks, I live for these tournaments. So as it starts again, I slink back to the sport I love to hate, its sexist atmosphere, role in heightening nationalism, and millions of dollars of dirty money forgotten. Barely.
I become a TV monster when tournaments like this start up. I was furious at my partner for making us late to the first game for doing such unimaginable things as “spending time with friends on a Friday night.” I later felt bad for even getting angry at him as Germany vs. Scotland seemed like a bad start to the tournament, a ritual win for one, a deeply humiliating 90 minutes for the other.
When I started watching soccer in earnest in high school, I remembered looking at amazing players just a bit older than me, and slowly becoming the same age as whatever bright young thing was tearing up the pitch. Now I’m 26, firmly within “best player” age, if I was capable of running more than 100 meters or handling a ball at all. I track my feelings about aging in the relation to my age and the ages of athletes, my feelings about aging that I used to think I was too enlightened to have.
All of this is to say that I only felt truly old once I saw Lamine Yamal take the field against Croatia, because my reaction wasn’t that of shock or angst over how young he is but of maternal concern. He looks so young, younger than my last generation of students when I used to work in a high school. A player this young already on the world’s stage (and it’s hard to even say that the Euros are his breakout stage when he’s already playing for Barcelona and has a buyout clause of 1 billion), is either going to be a generational talent or crash and burn spectacularly like prodigies before him. I hope he has a good support system, since I imagine solely focusing on professional sport so young can have a stunting effect.
I guess this is a true sign that I’m aging, looking at one of the best talented young athletes in the world and going “where are your parents.”
I should have probably been more worried about the dignity of Luka Modric, who was declassed by a kid over twenty years his junior.
It is difficult as a Croatian to even be upset about the Spain-Croatia game, I find it more upsetting if a game is close rather than one where you cannot say your team even came close to deserving to win. There’s something almost cathartic about being on the receiving end of a complete dressing down—congratulations, my team is part of someone else’s historic moment.
In a way, I’m grateful to Spain for exposing that the emperor has no clothes. Although I am a Croatia national team fan first, I am a Dalić hater as a close second, and a very close second. After years of coasting by on the preternatural talents of a generation, which were able to mask some very obvious tactical failures, Luka Modrić’s legs have finally given out, and the lack of imagination in Dalić has been revealed. A lot of the blunders in Croatia’s game against Spain are his classic mistakes, such as the wide gaps between the midfield and the forwards, meaning that for every run Brozović Kovačić and Modrić made, there was nobody in front to actually PASS to. The inexplicable coaching decisions, such as having Petković take the penalty or waiting until the 60-minute mark to make a substitution while 3-0 down. Dalić has been praised for his results, but his main skill as a coach until now has really been getting out of his player’s way. Now that a bit more coaching is required, his deficiencies are showing.
I’m not sure Marko Livaja would have saved the team against Spain, but a country lacking attacking options probably can’t afford to leave such a player at home. Livaja’s decision to no longer compete in the national team, which many fans read as an ouster by the federation after he received little support from his coach or team in the face of death threats from fans of club rival Rijeka, has only confirmed frequent complaints within Croatia that the national team serves as an extension of the (mafia) cabal around Dinamo Zagreb.
The wilderness of the early 2000s when the Croatian team was often painful to watch and the closest person we had to a star was Dado Pršo, aka the era that marked my childhood, draws nearer.
Croatian and Serbian soccer share similar problems in that the sport is closely linked to powerful political, economic (and some say criminal) interests that ultimately hinder the development of the sport and strangle the cash cow—and the careers of many players as well. Serbia seems to have had a rougher go of it as those leading the federation haven’t realized that if they let the team and its players flourish, they may be able to steal more money rather than stealing more money now.
I watch Serbia the next day with Robert, while living in Serbia, getting used to the fact that the announcer speaks my language but when he says “our team” the team is no longer in red and white checkers.
The day before Serbia’s match with England, the widespread pessimism in the country was so bad that during the official announcement on RTS, the national broadcaster, the announcer literally said “let’s just remember football is for fun and we watch this because we like the game.” Many look at the national team as a lovable band of bumbling idiots coached by a not-so-lovable bumbling idiot, so in that atmosphere, a 0-1 loss felt almost like a win, especially a loss that showed Serbia playing some of the best soccer it’s played in ages after conceding. A moral victory of sorts, although many (aka half my household) are still calling for coach Dragan Stojković’s head after some questionable decisions.
Dragan Stojković, nicknamed ‘Piksi,’ was indirectly involved in one of the most bizarre political scandals of the year in Niš, his hometown and my adopted hometown. A local elementary school was opening a soccer field in his honor. The opening ceremony was sponsored by a betting company (betting and gambling is unfortunately omnipresent in Serbia). The betting company put up a video screen, which fell and injured several kids and one teacher.
When Piksi got his (near-trademark) yellow card, my friend Tana described him as “sitting sadly like Humpty Dumpty,” a fitting description of the meme that shot across the Serbian internet.
On Day Four of Euro Cup day, some poor fool tweeted “man I love this sport but idk if I can watch Romania vs Ukraine.” Said poor fool was immediately clowned on Twitter (and by the events of the game), but I never understood this mentality. Maybe because I come from a small country who always lives for these tournaments, one of the only times our country gets to be on the world stage, so I like to see the other “small nations” of the world get their chance in the world stage. Plus, you never know which team today will be the Croatia of 2014: playing struggle ball now, destined to break out at the next tournament, and then you can tell everyone you followed them before it was cool.
Plus, Romania-Ukraine wound up being a classic for the ages.
Later that evening, France played Austria, and it became one of the few games so far I intentionally skipped. I know enough about the way of Didier Deschamps to know I would regret canceling my plans to watch his players.
A lot of fans consider it a bit of a tragedy that the managers of two of the most talented international teams of this generation are committed to a defensive, choking style of play that people have taken to calling “suffer-ball.” However, you can argue that managers don’t get hired to play beautiful soccer, or get paid to appeal to fans, they get paid to win. Soccer, like all sports, is a winner’s game, and if it takes an ugly path to get there, so be it.
On the other hand, as a fan, I must argue against suffer-ball. If this is the circuses in our modern-day bread and circuses, it is fair for the fans watching multi-millionaires kicking a single ball around from the confines of our miserable homes as the world crumbles around us to demand that it at least be fun.
I love the way the sport flows at international tournaments. It’s madder than during club seasons, more unpredictable (although the same few countries wind up doing well over and over again, money talks here as well), more prone to the narrative Cinderella stories that I adore. But as I watch the RTS reports from the Serbian fan zone, which erupts into the three-finger salute favored by genocidal forces in the 90s, I remember why I dislike international games. I shudder to think what was happening on the Croatian side. A bunch of guys kicking around a ball on a field so far away we can barely see it from the stands or we’re not even in the same country becomes another proxy for nationalism, another proxy for war, and if the team does well or poorly God help you if you walk down the street and you look like a minority. It’s not just a sport. Not in the emotional sense, that it matters to people (although it does), but in the sense that it has a material impact on people’s lives and safety. Yet again, my enjoyment of something becomes bitter, the crawling tentacles of Balkan nationalism worming its way into something fun.
I just want Cristiano Ronaldo to suffer.