Euros deserve to be remembered for more than a history-making final
Sunday’s European Championship final in Paris will make history. Either Portugal and Cristiano Ronaldo will capture their first-ever major title or host France will win its fourth consecutive championship on home soil, following victories in the 2003 Confederations Cup, 1998 World Cup and 1984 Euros.
In many other ways, however, the game (noon PDT, ESPN and ESPN Deportes) will be little different from past Euro finals. There will be a winner and a loser, a hero and a goat. There will be moments of spectacular athleticism and, given the conservative nature of most finals, long periods of tedium.
And then it will be time to move on to the World Cup two years hence.
But despite all that business as usual, this summer’s tournament in France should be remembered for more than its 90-minute final, no matter how exciting Sunday’s game may prove to be.
For starters it was the largest and longest Euro in history, with 24 teams and 51 games. And that expansion allowed for the emergence of giant-killers Iceland and Wales, two countries with a combined population smaller than the Dodgers’ regular-season attendance last season.
Wales, which had never played in the Euros – and hadn’t played in any major tournament since the 1958 World Cup -- won its group and became the tiniest country ever to reach a Euro semifinal before falling to Portugal.
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Yet Wales, with more than 3 million citizens, is nearly 10 times larger than Iceland, which beat England, tied Portugal and reached the quarterfinals behind a goalkeeper on leave from a job as a filmmaker and a head coach who is also a dentist.
They were kings in Iceland, though, where 99% of the country watched the Euros on TV and a crowd of 33,000 – more than a quarter of the population of Reykjavik – welcomed the players home with the team’s trademark Viking thunder clap.
Then there was the “Green Army,” the group of Irish supporters whose random acts of kindness stood in stark contrast to the ugliness peddled by hooligans from England, Russia, Germany, Ukraine and Croatia, who waged running street battles that sent dozens of people to either hospitals or jails and led UEFA to threaten Russia with disqualification from the tournament.
The good-natured Irish fans sang a lullaby to a baby on a train, changed a flat tire for an elderly couple, cleaned the streets of one city they visited and serenaded Swedish fans with a medley of Abba hits before a group-play game in Paris. The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, was so moved she awarded the fans the Grand Vermeil, the city’s highest honor previously presented to such worthy recipients as Noble Prize winner Toni Morrison.
More traditional memories will be made in Sunday’s final.
Ronaldo and Portugal have made it to semifinals of four of the last five Euros but advanced to the final just once, in 2004, when they lost to Greece. A win Sunday would give both the country and its biggest star their first major titles.
Meanwhile France and its tiny but tireless striker Antoine Griezmann, who leads the tournament with six goals, are playing to heal a nation still reeling from a series of deadly terrorist strikes that included the Stade de France, site of the final, among its targets. After the November attacks, some questioned whether France should still host the Euros; the country’s leaders stood fast, arguing that moving the games would be a victory for the terrorists.
They were right, of course, making Sunday a victory for France no matter who wins the game.
A Messi situation
Even before Lionel Messi was sentenced Wednesday to 21 months in prison for tax fraud, this hadn’t been the best of years for the world’s best player.
In April, his Barcelona club team was eliminated from the Champions League in the quarterfinals. In May, he was rushed to a hospital after nearly breaking his back in a friendly with Honduras. In June, he missed a penalty kick as Argentina lost to Chile in the final of the Copa America Centenario, extending the country’s drought to 23 years without a major international title.
And now he and his father Jorge have been convicted of using havens in Belize, Uruguay and elsewhere to avoid paying millions in taxes.
The Messis have denied the charges and will appeal the sentence to Spain’s Supreme Court. But even if they lose it’s unlikely either man will be jailed since Spanish law rarely requires a first-time offender sentenced to less than two years for a nonviolent crime to go to prison.
Nevertheless, the legal problems come at a delicate time both for Messi, a five-time world player of the year, and for Argentine soccer, which appears to be unraveling.
Messi’s announcement that he was retiring from international play following the loss to Chile, his third loss in a major final in three years, was originally blamed on raw emotions. But it was more likely a vote of protest against Argentina’s dysfunctional soccer federation, with which Messi – and much of Argentina -- has been feuding.
The federation had been rudderless since the 2014 death of Julio Grondona, its leader for 35 years. The government recently ordered an audit of the organization as part of a wider fraud probe while FIFA has stepped in and placed the federation under the control of a “stabilization” committee – creating chaos that led national team Coach Gerardo Martino and his staff to resign en masse last Tuesday.
Messi’s retirement threat brought much-needed international attention to the implosion of Argentine soccer. And though last week’s court ruling may make it difficult for him to claim the ethical high ground, it’s unlikely to stop him from pushing for the kind of reforms needed for Argentine soccer to break with its corrupt past.
Follow Kevin Baxter on Twitter @kbaxter11
