It's coming home?
England has had an underwhelming Euro 2024, but are somehow a game away from winning it. Plus: Canada goes down swinging, and a big change at MLSE
I read a piece the other day in which the author was aggressively mocked the Copa America coverage of Fox Sports, the tournament’s host broadcaster. Much of the complaints were familiar laments about U.S. coverage of soccer — it even noted that in this crazy world, it was nice that some things never change — but it also included among the gripes that one of the American panellists had compared the England national team to the Dallas Cowboys.
It didn’t explain why this was such a foolish comparison, although I would guess it has something to do with trying to shoehorn a true English institution, something that is not just a football team but is wrapped up in the national identity, into a side-by-side with an NFL franchise, one of the slickest for-profit enterprises in sports, owned by a rich Texan. The comparison is rather gauche.
Besides, England is more like the Toronto Maple Leafs. Both football in England and hockey in Toronto have a history that stretches back to the foundation of each sport. Both teams are best known for heartbreak. And, if we are being honest, for fan bases that can have unrealistic expectations of the quality of their teams. Also: England’s last major-tournament victory, the 1966 World Cup, just preceded the Leafs’ last Stanley Cup. The wait for another win now spans generations.
England, at least, has gotten close. So close. They reached the semi-finals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, losing to Croatia. They made the final of Euro 2020, delayed by a year due to the pandemic, and lost to Italy in a penalty shootout. And now, in Euro 2024, they are in the final again, where they will play Spain in Berlin on Sunday.
This latest run has been exceedingly weird. Manager Gareth Southgate, who has been in charge since the qualifying campaign in 2018, has made his bones by shaping England into a carefully constructed, defensively minded, low-event team — or, if you’d rather, a boring one — that was built to go deep in tournaments. But he’s never seemed to have a handle on this one. He was still experimenting with starting lineups in pre-tournament friendlies and began the Euros with Trent Alexander-Arnold, who plays at right back for Liverpool, in central midfield. He also played Kieran Trippier, a right-footed right back for Newcastle, at left back due to an injury to usual starter Luke Shaw and moved Jude Bellingham from central midfield to more of an attacking role because that’s what he did last year to great success with Real Madrid.
It was all a bit of a mess. England beat Serbia 1-0 to open their tournament, had to rescue a 1-1 draw against Denmark, and then played a stultifying nil-nil against Slovenia to somehow win the group despite scoring twice in three games. They then needed a miraculous stoppage time overhead kick from Bellingham to stave off defeat against Slovakia, which became an England win in extra time, and a not-quite-as-miraculous late goal from Bukayo Saka to draw level with Switzerland in the quarter-finals before winning that one on penalties. They were actually pretty good in the semi-finals against the Netherlands on Wednesday, but still needed an almost-as-miraculous goal at the death from Ollie Watkins to win in regulation time. Are England actually good, or just lucky as hell? Yes.
Spain, on the other hand, have been tremendous. So good that the only thing working against them is history. They have won six times, and no team has won seven games at a single Euros. (Brazil did that at the 2002 World Cup, though.) Obviously the safe move here is for Spain to play for the draw and then win the thing on penalties.
While Spain has clearly been the better team, there is precedent for countries to bumble their way through the tournament and then end up hoisting the trophy. Portugal won in 2016 despite winning just one of seven games in regulation time. Denmark won just twice to become champions in 1980, but the tournament was smaller then so they only played five games. England has played much better at other tournaments recently, but maybe this is the way for them to finally win another: play like crap for most of it, but somehow pip the other guys at the finish line.
It would, at least, be a funny way to end the drought.
Maple rising
Someone asked me recently what Canada winning the Copa America would have meant in hockey terms. What would be a similarly outsider country winning a best-on-best tournament like the Olympics? Slovakia? Latvia?
I replied that I think you’d have to go even weirder. A country with almost no experience of getting results at the highest levels of international hockey. Norway. Japan.
But I’m not sure even that was right. Canada is 48th in the men’s FIFA rankings. Argentina is, not surprisingly, first. In the men’s IIHF (hockey) rankings, Canada is, not surprisingly, first. I will admit that it’s a little unclear how the IIHF arrives at its rankings since Russia is still second, despite being a pariah state that hasn’t been allowed to enter an international tournament for years now. But Norway is 12th in those rankings, right behind Latvia and Denmark. The 48th-ranked team is Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, per the IIHF, has three hockey rinks and 291 players. Total. For the whole country. Other countries ranked above them include Mexico, New Zealand, Chinese Taipei and Spain. Man, that would be a hell of a Four Nations tournament.
This is partly a demonstration of how few hockey-playing nations there are in the world, but it also illustrates how much distance there can be between the top nation in a sport and one that is just cracking the top 50. Which is a VERY long way of saying Canada was always going to be in tough against Argentina in the Copa semis on Tuesday night. I think they can be proud that they gave it a shot. In my latest for theScore, I wrote about the debut of Marschball and where it might go from here:
Canada ultimately learned the same lesson under Marsch at the Copa America that it learned under John Herdman at the Qatar World Cup: To hang with the best soccer nations, it has to get better at converting its chances.
Manning cast (aside)
MLSE announced on Thursday the surprising news that Bill Manning was leaving his role as president(s) of Toronto FC and the Toronto Argonauts, effective immediately.
This was described as a “mutual decision,” but then the first quote from relatively new MLSE boss Keith Pelley in the Canadian Press story has him saying “today’s a very difficult day.” Doesn’t sound like a super-mutual decision!
Manning arrived in Toronto in 2015, filling a position that had been vacant for a while. TFC was great for a few years after Manning took over, although the amount of credit he deserves for that is debatable since the team was already on its way when he arrived, but they went in the tank post-pandemic, seemed to have things turned around this year under new coach John Herdman, but have been flailing around again.
The Argos, meanwhile, have been mostly good on the field since they came under the MLSE umbrella in 2018 and mostly a mess off of it, still unable to draw crowds to BMO Field that come anywhere close to those of TFC. This year they also had the Chad Kelly clusterfudge.
But it’s the TFC failures that Manning wears the most, which several management misfires in recent years and, especially, the incredibly expensive signing of a pair of Italian stars, Lorenzo Insigne and Federico Bernardeschi, in the summer of 2022. TFC has won 15 of 70 games since they debuted. Not great!
For the life of me, I will never understand why Manning admitted, proudly it seemed, that he decided that what TFC needed was a couple of high-profile Italians who would appeal to the large Italian-Canadian community in the city. The team already had great support, and had great support even when it stunk, which had been most of its existence. Once it became actually good, that support was off the charts. The key to making TFC a hot ticket again was simply to make the team competitive, since the market had already proven it would love a TFC led by Americans, Canadians, Spaniards, Italians, whatever. Instead Manning threw his lot in with a couple of wildly expensive forwards, even if there was no one in place to get them the ball in scoring positions. Had his scouting and/or analytics staff identified these players as a good fit for TFC? Nope, Manning went on the internet and searched for Italians.
“I actually went to the Transfermarkt website and I looked up the Italian national team on what players were coming out of contract,” Manning told reporters. “And Lorenzo was one of the few players that was coming out of contract.”
Again: he told this story publicly, for some reason. The results are what they are, and evidently Pelley had seen enough.
“There’s a lot of work ahead,” Pelley told CP. He’s got that right.