May the best team win
Football Ethics - EURO 2024 - The Beautiful Game
“And the best team won it!”
Peter Drury, mellifluous as ever in the commentary box, captures the thoughts of the world at the conclusion of the Euro 2024 football competition.
Indeed they did, Peter. “La Roja” are deserving campeones once more.
"May the best team win” is an adage introduced at the earliest stage of sporting competition. It is an ethical foundation of the game (any game) that requires its participants to accept the outcome as a fair reflection of the performance. It carries civility and acceptance of the prospect of loss.
I am challenged by the notion that anyone other than the best team can win. Isn’t the victorious team necessarily the best team?
I recall an interaction at the gym with a footballing opponent, several months after a season-defining loss to our team in the previous season. When recounting the end of their season and ultimate relegation, he remarked that their fate could have been avoided because ‘we should have beaten you guys at home’…
What? I was astounded. Offended. What nonsense.
Do you mean to suggest that you wish you had? Or that you expected to, based on assumptions from past-performance? Perhaps you mean to say that because you led for 95% of the game that your loss was unfair. In my reckoning, to be the better team for the majority of a game and then bad enough in the remainder to lose, is just deserts.
To suggest that you were the better team on the day and that you lost is a logical fallacy. It offends the nobility of the principle in question. If you were the better team - how did you lose?
It also denies the obvious difference in opinion between the competitors. Our experience, of course, was of a resplendent come-from-behind victory, the triumph of a desperate and virile young squad in an insurmountable task.
As the antagonist illustrates above, ours is an adage often cited and more frequently disregarded.
Spare us the qualification of your defeat and take loss with humility and grace.
Not the two characteristics commonly used to segue to the English.
This will not be an exercise in Pom bashing. I haven’t needed to entertained sore-loserism, not even on my Twitter (X) feed. That’s because there isn’t a shade of ambiguity about the victorious Spanish national side being the “best” team on Sunday.
International football competitions are a domain that trouble our adage.
To be victorious at one of these summer-competitions requires such dogged determination and consistency that, ultimately, systems win.
Think Greece in 2004, Italy in 2006. Please, for the love of the round ball, do not suggest to me that either team was anything other than the “best”. Rather, the demands of competition football distorts the purist’s notion of Best.
In sports, “process” is everything, but only "results” count. So victorious systems are often geared toward the desired result: avoiding loss. Such was the success of King Otto’s Hellenes and Lippi’s Azzurri.
Euro 2024 provided 24 nations with ancient ties, medieval feuds and contemporary political tensions with an opportunity for battle. Each team would be the voice of a nation, representative of progress or regress; pride or cowardice.
To quote Eduardo Galleano, the Nobel Laureate of the World Game and a muse from whom you will be hearing much more, football is war —
11 men in shorts are the sword of the neighborhood, the city, or the nation.
So it was that Spain faced off against England in Berlin. The nations with rival, pre-eminent professional leagues and interlocked histories.
The road to Berlin had been a tough one. England defeated Netherlands (2-1) in the Protestant Cup for the right to compete in the Grand Final against the victor of the Catholic Conference, in which Spain beat France (2-1).1
The capital city of Germany, the lands of Luther’s uprising, would pit the Catholic Church against its 16th century defector in the battle for Western Christendom. Or so you could be excused for imagining. Ultimately, the True Faith prevailed over heresy.2
Had you not been watching throughout, you might have not expected that result.
The PR machine had whirred to life with inspirational television ads that sent echoes of It’s comin’ home bouncing off die Platze of Germany and living rooms alike.
Alas, a BBC montage does not a victor make.
To have followed the competition was to see a Spanish side sparkling with technical prowess. The culmination of a coherent national football culture that has produced 27 international titles from Spanish clubs and national teams since 2001.3
I have not seen a national team play such a beautiful game for years.
As the game has turned to systems to grind down the possibility of defeat, La Roja have allowed us to ‘believe that football is not irredeemably condemned to mediocrity’.4
English optimism for victory felt melancholic. Southgate’s team was too reliant on individual efforts: Foden’s three nearly-strikes in the semis, a magic touch from King Kane, a moment of madness from St Jude. It was a team stacked with talent, but a system that didn’t feel coherent and coordinated.
The youthful Spaniards were at once potent and beautiful.
The results reflect that. Spain won all 7 games. They emerged atop danger group C. They beat each of the favourites. They played beautiful balls in midfield and activated the wings with pace. They scored electric goals and blooded fresh talent.
One statistic familiar to AFL fans is expected score. It has proven an insightful tool for understanding and managing the reliance on individual brilliance. It bridges the distance, or at least makes legible the relationship, between process and result.
An analysis of expected goals (xG) in the Euro Final assessed the result as Spain 2 (2.31xG) - 1 (0.63xG) England.5
Dig a little further and you find that England’s last six goals at Euro 2024 all had an expected Goal rating of less than 0.25. Jude’s bicycle kick was 0.05xG, Palmer from outside the box past David Raya 0.03xG. This is symptomatic of a team reliant on individual brilliance. The English (6.43) produced less xG than Croatia (7.1), who tumbled out at the Group Stage. Whereas Spain scored the most goals and created the best ratio of expected goals created : conceded in the final stages.
They are deserving champions.
They have affirmed the Beautiful Game.
Credit to @dennismhogan on X
I won’t press the religious comparison between the “Old World” Church and Protestant individualism. Rest assured it will be explored in due course.
In fact, every time since May 2001 (when Alaves lost to Liverpool in the UEFA Cup) that a Spanish team has appeared in a final, a Spanish team has won. We can’t say Spanish teams are undefeated, of course, because several of those finals were between Spanish clubs.
Football in Shadow and Sun, Galeano nostalgic for the raw amateur beauty of early football.
For all the xG analysis, see @xGPhilosophy on Twitter for a fantastic assessment and a link to the book xGenius.
Loved this.