STANDING AMID THE HUNDREDS of football fans layered along platform 16 at Dortmund’s main station, an England fan gurgles a half-formed cry of helpless frustration. “Your trains are shit but we can’t mention the war.”
It probably made more sense in his head, but this is the matchday transport experience in Germany: an exasperation so teeth-grindingly irritating that it’s difficult to articulate.
Given hotel prices in Dortmund have increased tenfold for the occasion of the second semi-final, this England fan is like thousands of others in needing to get back to hotels in neighbouring towns.
I’m in the same situation, and need to get to Essen, which is 40km away. We are waiting for a 12.45am train that the platform screen tells us has been delayed to 1.08am. The clock ticks slowly, slowly. A few England fans are arrayed in various states of distress on the ground, but most are giddily watching footage of Ollie Watkins’ preposterous late winner.
A group of Dutch fans are singing songs supporting Spain, that “football is staying in Europe”. An Irish accent slips out from the crowd, reminding a group of Dutch fans about their 2002 World Cup campaign. He shows them a video of Jason McAteer’s goal, and is then quickly talking of how we’d have made the semi-finals of the World Cup if Roy hadn’t been sent home. Because trust me, lads, he was sent home, he didn’t walk.
There’s a packed train sitting at the platform opposite us, on which some of my Irish colleagues are squashed. It has been sitting still for two hours. 1.08am comes and goes. It’s 1.30am and our train has still not arrived. Sighs among the fans turn to a staccato collection of despairing shouts. At around 1.45am, the train simply disappears from the screen. There is no train. Perhaps there never was.
I rush down the steps to the main station amid this mass sweep of angry supporters, and there is now only one word in my universe. Essen. Essen. Essen. I have to get to Essen. I run from platform to platform, looking for any which are displaying the word Essen. I find one on platform 21, and sprint up the steps. The train is stopped but packed with people and with its doors locked. There is no way onboard.
This is like Super Mario: a game of desperate platform-hopping, but rather than collecting mushrooms and coins, I am hunting for the word Essen.
Police block the steps of many of the platforms, saying they are already too packed, turning around beaten-down supporters by telling them to find another train. “There are no fackin’ trains,” spits a furious England fan.
Platform 26 is another promising Essen, and I take the steps three at a time. A train! The button on its doors is flashing green, so I push it and am met with a bunch of roaring Dutch fans telling me there’s no room.
Getting out of Dortmund is a Darwinian event, though, so I push on anyway. A couple of fans shove me back out, only for some heroic Dutch fan to then grab my collar and pull me in. The train is seemingly only for Dutch fans, but my accreditation lanyard has marked me as Not English, which was good enough for my saviour.
The doors close behind me and then immediately open as a couple of English fans try to shove on. They are pushed back onto the platform, and when one tries to push back on again, one Dutch fan grazes him on the side of the head with a flailing punch. The doors close before the situation escalates any further, though the England fans beat on the window and roar with a demoralised fury with which I can relate.
This thump-thump-thump continues as we stand still for another 10 minutes, at which point the driver comes over the intercom to say there are too many passengers on board. “We cannot move until some passengers get off and take another train,” says the disembodied voice of remote, dispassionate evil. Pal, there are no other trains.
I try to hide myself among Dutch fans as I know I will be the first for slaughter if things turn a bit Lord of the Flies. There is no signal, but I stare with ludicrous intensity at my phone, knowing the moment I make eye contact with someone is the moment I am gone.
Minutes that feel like years pass and nobody has moved, when eventually a group of Dutch supporters decide to fall on their sword. They wade through bodies to the doors, and find them locked.
One of them sinks his hands in between the doors and tries to prise them open. Thwarted, he then begins to lace the glass doors with kicks. I feel like telling him that if he breaks the doors then none of us are getting out of Dortmund tonight. But then, just before the doors buckle and smash, we are endowed with our miracle. First a jerk, then a chug, and all of a sudden we are trundling out of Dortmund.
It’s a 15-minute train from Dortmund to Essen. I get back to my hotel four hours after the final whistle.
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This is a typical scene from Germany’s European Championship: a sweaty, chaotic, and improvised experience where you are reminded at every turn at how difficult it has become to be a football fan. No travelling customers anywhere else in the world consistently pay so much to be treated so badly.
Uefa aggressively police the commercial aspects of their tournament – God forbid the logo of a non-official partner is glimpsed at any point – but were happy to delegate the vital business of transport and logistics to the local organisers.
That meant millions of football fans were put in the fumbling hands of Deutsche-Bahn, the train operators who put the Bahn in Bahnjaxed.
The entire infrastructure is antiquated, suffering from decades of under investment. The levels of neglect vary between regions, but it all flows from Germany’s past. The hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic means modern Germany is hyper cautious of spending public money rather than saving it. This has been codified in the “debt brake”, which limits the amount of new debt the government can take on each year to just 0.35% of GDP.
The result is a train system that the government has described as being in “permacrisis” and is losing an unfathomable €5 million a day. Deutsche-Bahn pledged an extra 10,000 train seats a day for the tournament, which the German transport minister has since admitted was too ambitious, given that the crumbling infrastructure could not cope with the added pressure. But there was no papering over the tracks. More trains just meant more disruption when a creaking signal light failed or a piece of track suffered a mysterious “technical problem”.
On the Deutsche-Bahn, you don’t plan a journey: you aspire to one.
Those sadly fated to rely on these trains every day deal with the many delays and no-shows with a mixture of black humour and exasperated resignation. Once, when a train bound for Leipzig stopped for more than an hour due to a power cut onboard, a German man beside me sighed within the gloom and said, “Welcome to Deutsche-Bahn”.
It struck me as a steadily corrosive thing, to expose vast swathes of the population to a daily reminder that their country is not working as it ought to. The ballot box offers a means of response, but dealing with the constant upheaval and complication is otherwise a constant process of resignedly accommodating yourself to the whims of something beyond your control. All of those tiny compromises will eventually add up.
A similar process came to define the football at the tournament, too. Irish coach Mark O’Sullivan wrote an interesting blog during the tournament, arguing it has been defined by adaptions rather than any grand tactical trends or ideas.
In this case, everyone had to adapt to their own fatigue. There was a sense in many games of a deliberate intent to conserve energy: it was striking how often teams sat back after taking the lead. This has been a perpetual English characteristic but every major team did it at this tournament. Even Spain did so, and were almost made to pay for it by Germany in the quarter-final.
The expansion of this competition to 24 teams is one emblem of an endlessly bloating game, where the only motivating principle appears to be more, more, more. The next instalments of the Champions League and the World Cup have more games, while Fifa have also added a supersized Club World Cup next summer.
“There’s more and more games and it looks like it isn’t about to stop,” Rodri told the Guardian ahead of the semi-finals. “You have to take care of players. I’m very conscious of that. I reached a point where I can’t do it any more.”
Fatigue might have played a role in ensuring there were so few upsets at the tournament. Ralf Rangnick’s high-pressing Austria topped their group ahead of France and the Netherlands but ran out of energy in their knockout tie against Turkiye. This was one of just three knockout ties prior to the final that was won by the team lower in the Fifa rankings, the others being Switzerland’s win over Italy and Spain’s over France.
And with fatigue sapping away the collective potential of teams, individual class stood out more than usual. England stumbled their way to the final thanks to a riot of amazing individualism: Jude Bellingham’s overhead kick against Slovakia; Bukayo Saka’s inch-perfect equaliser against Switzerland; Ollie Watkins’ jolting winner against the Dutch.
Another trend of the tournament was the dominance of young stars, those not yet ground down by the excessive and ceaseless demands of football’s industrial complex. Most obviously Lamine Yamal, who turned 17 on the eve of the final and lit up the tournament with the sparkle of his play and the glint of his braces.
There was also his 21-year-old team-mate Nico Williams, Turkiye’s teenage talisman Arda Guler, and 19-year-old Kobbie Mainoo, who proved to be a large part of the answer to England’s many midfield troubles.
Spain were joyous champions, but they profited from losing some of their ideology. “Here, we try to be a bit more vertical,” explained Rodri. “Without so much possession, but possession to do damage to the opponents.” Hence the opening-day win over Croatia marked the first time Spain had less possession than their opponents since 2008.
Luis de la Fuente models himself as a traditional Spaniard who believes in Catholicism and bullfighting, and his team proved as interested in the old principles of La Furia Roja as they did in tiki-taka. But, crucially, his team were fresh and energetic to play that way. Seven of England’s starting outfield players in the final played in the Champions League quarter-finals, whereas only three of Spain’s made it that far. Five of those England players made at least 45 club appearances this season, whereas only Rodri, Yamal, and Morata hit the same number for Spain, and Yamal was the only one of the trio to play the last half-hour in Berlin.
At 25, Kylian Mbappe should have been at his physical peak at this tournament, but the semi-final contrast with Yamal was profound. It’s the first time Mbappe has looked old on a football pitch, encumbered by his broken nose and a back problem from which he has suffered for months. This felt like the first glimpse of the latest superstar from whom too much has been squeezed; a guy showing the first signs of having been asked to make too many accommodations to the governing bodies’ rapacity.
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Are you ready for Sommermarchen 2.0? asked the posters lining the walls of the Munich metro station ahead of the opening night, recalling the heady ‘summer fairytale’ that was the 2006 World Cup.
Returning to Munich for the semi-finals, the same posters were gone, with the inconstant rectangles of left-behind adhesive the only hint that they ever existed in the first place.
Germany’s 2006 World Cup semi-final against Italy abides as one of the great tournament games, one that ended in heroic defeat for Jurgen Klinsmann’s loveable team. This time around, Germany’s only involvement in the tournament’s final week was the thousands of overly-optimistic fans who bought tickets for the Munich semi-final and had nothing to do but boo Marc Cucurella over his handball in the previous round, creating the sense of a tournament that has been dragging on for so long that it was already referencing itself.
To live through the tournament was to live with a constant sense of comparison, and deal with a certain feeling of thwarted promise and of a prospect diminished.
Why is this not as good as 2006? Is it even as good as it should be? Is the tournament just too long? Are the players too tired? Why don’t the trains work like they used to? Why don’t the biggest teams attack games like they used to? Did Cristiano Ronaldo always move this slowly?
Germany is a country which encourages pause and comparison. Few other countries in the world have erected as many monuments and plaques to their own shame, and it’s why Berlin’s holocaust memorial was placed so close to the Reichstag: nobody can govern for today without an awareness of yesterday. As the political commentator Michael Sturmer has said, “in Germany, for a long time, the purpose of history was to ensure it could never happen again.”
Euro 2024 was partly defined by the revisiting of the legacy of the 2006 Sommermarchen. I interviewed Dr. Clemens Heni prior to the Euros, who quickly swam against the 2006 tide in criticising the World Cup as a festival of “nationalism”, drawing links between it and the rise of the far-right AfD, which finished second in the EU elections held the weekend before the tournament kicked off.
One of the history’s lessons in Germany was an embedded reticence at flying the national flag, but that was all lost amid the exuberance of the World Cup.
The organisers of Euro 2024 explicitly rejected the same prospect. Theirs was not a German event, but a European event held in Germany. The official tournament slogan read, “United by football. United in the heart of Europe”, while the logo broke with the 2006 equivalent by not featuring the colours of the German flag. Instead, it was a composite of all of the national flags of the 24 competing nations.
And it all felt like an anachronism in real time.
The first blow to the new slogan was evident on the very opening night, when the visitors pulled up at the Allianz Arena with a message on the window of their team bus reading “Scotland is united by football.” The people of Glasgow might not agree.
The branding felt worse than Uefa’s usual corporate pablum: it felt hopelessly naive at a tournament whose fraying seams were constantly prodded and poked by toxic nationalism.
Serbia were fined as their fans displayed a banner depicting a map which claimed Kosovo as part of their territory.
Uefa withdrew the accreditation of a journalist from Kosovo who made an Albanian eagle gesture at Serbian fans.
An Albanian player, Mirlind Daku, was banned for two games for leading fans in a chant of “Fuck the Serbs”, while Albania and Croatia were fined for chanting “Kill, kill, kill the Serb”.
Turkiye’s Merih Demiral was banned for two games for making a wolf gesture, associated with the ultranationalist “grey wolves” movement, while thousands of supporters followed suit in front of Erdogan at Turkiye’s very next game.
A group of England fans went to games wearing masks of Nigel Farage, carrying a banner reading “Stop the Boats.”
An Austrian fan displayed a banner reading “Defend Europe”, which is linked to the anti-immigrant, far-right Identitarian Movement.
Gibraltar launched an official complaint with Uefa over Spain’s “Gibraltar is Spanish” chants at their victory parade in Madrid.
France players, led by Mbappe, Marcus Thuram, Ibrahmia Konate and Jules Kounde, spent much of the tournament pleading with their people to vote and block the rise to power of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.
And Germany, for all its earnest efforts to learn from their past sins, appears to be on the brink of relapsing back into a tolerance of the extreme right, with the AfD polling nationally at around 18%. The electoral map of the party’s gains in the EU elections is stark: it shows that while the Berlin wall has fallen, the divide between east and west remains.
Still two countries: how Germany voted. (Black=Union; blue=AfD). pic.twitter.com/OUCM82ijcr
— Tom Nuttall (@tom_nuttall) June 10, 2024
Whatever vision of unified Germany was celebrated at the 2006 Sommermarchen either never existed or has ceased to exist.
Euro 2024 skewed west, too. Leipzig was the only venue in the old East to host games – Berlin’s Olympiastadion was in the city’s western sector – while the only member of the German squad born in the old East was Toni Kroos.
Before France/Netherlands in Leipzig, I visited the Contemporary History Forum, which tells the history of the old East from the moment of Hitler’s death, but doesn’t have an ending. Instead, the final exhibit is a giant screen onto which visitors’ questions, thoughts and laments on German unification are projected. It was another room that screamed of thwarted promise.
Displayed at the museum is a 2001 painting by Matthias Koeppel titled “…and everything will be fine again”. It looks back with irony at the complacency of Berlin’s post-unity celebrations in 1990, criticising the frenzy of consumption and the mood of uncritical celebration.
I looked at the flag-waving and the beer-drinking and the staged atmosphere and the giant corporate logo and instantly thought that this could have been a scene from any of Uefa’s organised fan zones at Euro 2024.
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There is a phenomenon in the old East called Ostalgie, which is a portmanteau of ‘East’ and ‘Nostalgia’ and expresses a curious hankering for life in the old Soviet-controlled GDR.
It begs an obvious question: for all of today’s obvious problems, how could life have been better beneath the boot of authoritarianism?
The writer Jenny Erpenbeck, whose novel Kairos this year won the International Booker Prize, is one of the great writers on the subject.
“There are some kinds of freedom that you wouldn’t expect to have surrounded by a wall, but it’s also a freedom not to be forced to expose yourself and shout out all the time about how important you are and what you have reached, to sell yourself,” she told the New York Times earlier this year.
“I had a feeling that the east liked giving the rest of the country a scare. If you can’t be the good child, then you try to be the bad child and start screaming. Suddenly the west was forced to listen and engage with how people in the former GDR felt.”
Wander through Leipzig’s Forum and you realise that perhaps Ostalgie is just another means of shouting about oneself. It articulates and preserves a certain way of life, and it accentuates the fact that the essential individualism of people is still possible beneath a collectivist regime.
Blue jeans hang in one exhibit to show how the wearing of them became a kind of protest in themselves, while the lagging housing construction programme was parodied by artist Jurgen Kieser, sculpting a giant snail with a hard-hat perched on its back. The same could be erected in Dublin tomorrow morning.
And international football is ultimately about the same thing. It’s an easy means of shouting out all the time about how important we are and what we have reached; a method of articulating a distinct identity that is much too alive to live in a museum.
It was evident throughout these Euros. Turkiye’s migrant population in Germany meant they were an ersatz home side, driven by a wild, fervent support, and they were heard throughout the night in every German city as they blared their car horns in celebration.
Albania’s migrant population was expressed in their opening game against Italy, where fans managed to get their hands on around 50,000 tickets and transform Dortmund as Irish fans did to Giants Stadium 30 years earlier.
The sport’s great democratic sweep of joy finally came for Georgia, who sashayed through to the last-16 in magnificent fashion, their fans embracing the tournament as a diverted route to Europe while their government erected roadblocks.
And this is not nationalism.
Nationalism defines identity in opposition to something else, and so it must always seek to divide. International football is defined by the collective, it binds people together because of their differences, as they all buy into a single idea.
God knows it is imperfect, and too often at the tournament, these international sides were hijacked by forces who seek to divide.
But at a time when the world needs welcoming expressions of collective identity, supporting one’s national football teams remains a fragile, needlessly draining, but worthy idea.
The day after Germany were eliminated from the Euros, manager Julian Nagelsmann wept in tribute to the support the team had received, following years of cool apathy from the county. A couple of days later, the sports newspaper Kicker summed it up all up with a headline” “The New We.”
Read the word “WE” after a major international tournament and it is impossible not to be caught in the warm rush of its potential, and then queasily recoil in the resignation that its ambitions will not survive the sweeping away of the confetti of another chaotic, irresistible celebration of football.
The lesson: The New We is not an illusion. It’s just something in which too many politicians and voters are unwilling to believe.
