Barely lifting his eyes from the floor, Marcelo Bielsa started out with an elegy for what had been lost and ended with a lament for all that is to come. Lesser managers than Bielsa, Uruguay’s philosopher-coach, might have been preoccupied by the looming material reality of a Copa América quarterfinal with Brazil. Bielsa has always been more concerned by the ethereal.
The picture he painted was emotional, heartfelt and midnight black. Soccer’s glory, he said, is that it was always free, a “popular property,” one of the few pleasures available even “to the poorest people.” Now, “the business” that has swallowed the game whole has wrenched it brutally from their grasp.
“Soccer has more and more spectators but it is becoming less and less attractive,” he said. “What made this the best game in the world is not prioritized today. No matter how many people watch, if you do not make what they are watching pleasant, it will only benefit the business.”
Bielsa’s vision of the future is more than bleak; it is ever so slightly apocalyptic. There will, he predicted, be fewer players who “deserve to be watched.” In turn, the game will be “less enjoyable.” As the spectacle diminishes, the “artificial” boom in spectators that has turned soccer into the global cultural phenomenon it has become will start to wither and fade.
So forlorn, so dystopian was his worldview that it is only really possible to conclude one thing: As well as guiding a thrilling, and apparently extremely hands-on Uruguay team to the semifinals of the Copa América, Marcelo Bielsa has probably been watching a little too much of the European Championship.
Euro 2024 has not been a bad tournament, not really. It has had a smattering of absorbing games, most of them involving Austria, Georgia or Turkey. It has been embroidered by a handful of wondrous moments: Italy’s last-minute equalizer against Croatia; Lamine Yamal’s sensational tide-turning goal against France; Cristiano Ronaldo’s crying because he missed a penalty.
In its early weeks, the Euros were, as major international competitions must be, a riot of color and noise and fervor as Germany played host to huge, joyous contingents of Albanians and Romanians and Scots, all of them relishing the chance to fly their flags in front of the eyes of the world. It will be remembered, too, as the tournament in which a new generation of stars rose: Kobbie Mainoo, Arda Guler, Xavi Simons and, most transcendent of all, Yamal himself.
But it has also provided ample evidence for the accuracy of Bielsa’s prophecy. This is the seventh European Championship this century. Only one has seen fewer goals. Slowly but surely the tournament has sluiced away any team — with the exception of Spain — that showed any audacity, any verve, any imagination.
Three of the semifinalists endorsed and espoused the tournament’s dominant style: what they might characterize as controlled and clinical but which has largely come across, both within the stadiums and on television, as cold and cautious.
England, France and the Netherlands largely set out to extinguish their games. Everyone calls it pressing. Such is the emphasis on athleticism, on physicality, though, that its effect is closer to throttling. Spain stands as the exception, but it is hard not to feel that Luis de la Fuente’s team would be a vaguely discordant winner if it beats England in the final on Sunday.
There are reasons for that, what might be considered mitigating circumstances. Gareth Southgate, the England coach, pointed out perfectly reasonably that these tournaments are not so much sporting contests as national incidents, ones that rest on the slender and fragile shoulders of very young men. It is to some extent natural that they might find it hard to express themselves.
When his French counterpart, Didier Deschamps — a man who has done more than anyone to advocate for asphyxiation as a philosophy — noted that his lavishly gifted squad had been unable to live up to its billing at the tournament for “various reasons,” at the forefront of his mind was most likely the fact that they are all visibly exhausted, running on fumes after four years of almost endless soccer. The same goes for most of the other major nations. Soccer, desperately, needs a break from itself.
And then, of course, there is the fact that the soundtrack to all major competitions — the World Cup, as well as the European Championship — is provided by a chorus of complaints that they are not as good as they used to be.
It has become a familiar refrain that the sport is a pale shadow of what it was 20 years ago. The evidence on that is not convincing. Twenty years ago, Greece was busy becoming European champions by trying as hard as possible not to shoot; the anti-aesthete José Mourinho was the most coveted manager in Europe; and Brazil had not long since won the World Cup under the stern hand of Luis Felipe Scolari. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, but it can also be a hallucinogen.
That is not to say that Bielsa’s grim prognosis is wrong. Pressing — a style of play, we should note here, that Bielsa himself has done much to proselytize — is designed to inhibit the sort of individual brilliance that draws fans to the game. More than that, in fact: It is a philosophy rooted in the idea that the best form of creation is not your player’s talent, but your opponent’s lack of it, that the most creative force in the game is forcing someone else to make a mistake.
Combined with the saturation of the game with data, driven on a fundamental level by a desire to reduce soccer to its most efficient and most reliable form, soccer is slowly being drained of wonder. Most coaches now discourage players to shoot from distance. Wingers are encouraged not to embark on winding and likely ineffective runs, but to retain possession, recycle the ball, wait for a slip. It is — and this is said without censure — soccer by algorithm, a game reduced to a formula.
The effect, as Euro 2024 has encapsulated, is a uniformity of style. In “Filterworld,” the writer Kyle Chayka explores the rise of what he has called “AirSpace”: the Instagram-driven aesthetic that means all trendy coffee shops and hotels and restaurants the world over look the same as each other, from the succulents to the industrial-chic lighting.
That is just the start, Chayka argues, of the ways in which the digital algorithms that govern much of our lives are homogenizing culture. The same principle applies to what we eat, what we watch, where we travel, and where we stay when we do.
A similar case can be made for soccer. Most European countries used to have a distinctive style, a mildly offensive stereotype that was, basically, true. The French were temperamental, maverick virtuosos. The Dutch were neat, technical, free form, and also kind of temperamental. The Italians were gritted teeth and clenched fists and Giorgio Chiellini celebrating a defensive throw-in. The English were blood and thunder and lack of sophistication. The Germans were resilient and tough.
What this tournament has shown is that all of those individual characters have been lost, overtaken by what Chayka might describe as AirSpace soccer: a form of the game defined by rigid discipline, the dominance of system, bursts of pressing. Spain, considered the exception, is not really so distinct. It is just better than everyone else at doing the same thing.
Where Bielsa is wrong, though, is where all of this leads. His charm has always been that he is a being of pure soccer. He sees the game with the innocent heart and the unpolluted mind of the purist. He earnestly believes that if players find their ingenuity and their invention constricted by the game’s endless search for control, fewer people will watch.
They will not, of course. If anything, even as it becomes less entertaining, more and more people will watch. The game’s cultural primacy will become more and more fixed.
Soccer, in Bielsa’s mind, is “more than just five minutes of highlights.” To many, though, that is precisely what it is, or at least what it is becoming. It is bite-size content, an eternally rolling war of words, a 10-second clip with Arabic commentary on social media.
Or it is something essentially unrelated to the game: an endless doomscroll for morsels from the transfer market, a video of iShowSpeed mispronouncing names, an argument without resolution or purpose, supported by specific pinpricks of data that have been cherry-picked and decontextualized.
Its heroes, its stars, command a loyalty that is related only incidentally to who they are playing for or how they are playing. They are supported, now, much more like musicians or reality television protagonists than athletes.
Soccer was, as Bielsa said, a form of “cultural expression.” Like all forms of cultural expression, though, it is now really just another manifestation of celebrity culture. Are you a Bellingham guy or a Yamal stan? You have to choose, and you have to stick with it.
The business, the one that Bielsa resents, knows this. Of course it does. The business might even have designed it this way. The business does not care whether you watch the whole game or not. It does not care who wins, and it most certainly does not care how.
It does not care about the sport. It cares only about the content. And there is more content than ever, more things to sell, and more and more ways to make sure that you buy. Bielsa is right. The game will lose. But the business always wins.
A Final Word About the Hosts
Rewind a month, and Germany was a country beset with worry, my colleague Christopher Schuetze writes. As it prepared to open its doors to the rest of the continent, Germany found itself in a funk, one inspired not just by an underperforming team but also a stagnating economy, a fragile government, and a surging far-right.
The worry was that failure at Euro 2024 would compound the mood of national crisis. But as the tournament draws to a close, with Germany having recorded a creditable quarterfinal finish — the furthest Germany has advanced in any men’s soccer tournament in nearly a decade — its performance has, if anything, had the opposite effect.
“The tournament gave Germany back some of its lightness,” said Lena Lehman, 33, even after Spain eliminated the host nation in Munich.
Hosting the Euros has not, of course, alleviated any of the concerns that existed at the start of June: the war in Ukraine, climate change, democracy itself. But it has offered Germans a change of perspective. “With the AfD at 20 percent these days, it’s just nice to have all these visitors and all these exchanges,” said Semjon Brinkman, 33.
The effect has perhaps not been quite as strong as it was in 2006, the year of the World Cup that became known as Germany’s sommermärchen, its summer fairy tale, and is now regarded as a defining moment in the country’s modern history. But that has not stopped politicians from trying to piggyback on the positivity.
Olaf Scholz, who has never distinguished himself as a soccer fan, has been a fixture at games. Selfies of grinning cabinet ministers at the sidelines abound on the regular political talk shows that make up Germany’s sometimes stuffy public television offering.
“Together we have managed to wake people up a little,” Germany’s coach, Julian Nagelsmann, said at the end of his, and his team’s, tournament. “And create beautiful moments.”
Succession Planning
Not every review conducted by U.S. Soccer has to be a time-consuming one, it turns out. Gregg Berhalter’s reign as coach of the men’s national team — maybe his second, depending on how technical we are being — lasted only a week or so after a defeat to Uruguay sealed its elimination from the Copa América. That is not something to be celebrated, of course, but nor is it difficult to explain.
Now, two years out from the World Cup, the questions turns to who should replace him. It is a time frame to focus the mind. A week after assuring Jaime Lozano that he would not be fired, another troubled 2026 host, Mexico, is busy staying true to the letter of its promise, if not quite the spirit: the vastly experienced Javier Aguirre may be parachuted in above him.
There is no such obvious or reflex appointment for U.S. Soccer. Jürgen Klopp has, reportedly, been approached — ambitiously, but you have to try — and demurred. His countryman, Joachim Löw, might be more amenable, and would represent a coup. Steve Cherundolo is the standout homegrown candidate.
There are several familiar faces from Europe who command respect — Thomas Tuchel, in particular, but also Lucien Favre — but it may well be David Wagner who ticks more boxes than any other. He is a former U.S. international. He has recent experience at the highest level. He has a defined vision of how the game should be played. It might feel like an anticlimax. But it kind of makes sense.
That’s all for this week. Next week’s edition will be the hotly-anticipated mailbox special, so if this weekend’s two finals bring anything that you have to get off your chest immediately, please let me know at [email protected].
I hope you all have a great weekend. I suspect you will if you are English. And Colombian, too, as it happens.
Rory
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