BERLIN, Germany — By Sunday night, it will all be done. Spain's selection of young prospects, young prospects and young prospects, under the watchful eye of everyone's favorite substitute coach, Luis de la Fuente, will have delivered the country Euro 2024, a European crown in three of the past five tournaments.
Or England, who have already made the transition from tragicomic self-destructors to almost-men (this is their second successive Euro final and they also reached the World Cup semi-finals in 2018), will take that final step into the history books and win a major tournament, something they haven't achieved since 1966 (and even that, for most, came with an asterisk).
Either way, there will be an air of finals and international football will largely go back on the shelf until 2026 and the World Cup extravaganza with three hosts and 48 nations in the United States, Mexico and Canada. The cycle of top-flight club football is relentless, the first qualifying round of the 2024-25 Champions League was played last week, the game’s heavyweights are packing up for their summer tours and, outside the countries of the two finalists, transfer stories are pushing the Euros to the sidelines.
Yet Euro 2024 leaves a mark on everyone who was part of it, whether as players or fans. After Qatar 2022, the COVID-restricted Euro 2020 and Russia 2018, this was the first major tournament in a long time that felt accessible, both geographically (for most fans it was a train ride or short flight away) and practically, with most German cities being diverse and welcoming, multicultural and multilingual hubs, with prices to suit all tastes. Indeed, fans were seen mingling on the cobblestones of Sachsenhausen in Frankfurt and on the 70,000-strong Fan-mile by Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate: not just different jerseys, but rich and poor, young and old, drunk and sober, tattooed and puritanical – it felt like it belonged to everyone.
This sounds corny, until you realise the recent history of the setting for today's final, Berlin. A city that, as the local saying goes, is “always becoming, never being” – in the sense that it is always evolving and mutating, ever since seven separate towns grew up together into one and somehow managed to maintain their distinct identities two centuries later. Today, most Berliners were not born in the city, but that doesn't make you any less of a Berliner, as John F. Kennedy realised more than half a century ago.
It is a city that understands its role in the world as the countercultural capital of Europe, but which also faces its dark past on a daily basis, from the madness of the Nazi era (examples such as the Accident protection body (still standing) to the Berlin Wall that split it in two, in a senseless act of self-harm. Instead of erasing the past, they have chosen to contextualize it, in the hope that those two words “Never again” will remain a reality.
But let's get back to football.
The legacy of what happens on Sunday will affect a nation for the next 24 months, and it will do so for different reasons.
For England, it will be the end of a wait that feels like a curse: how can the nation that invented the game, that hosts the world's strongest league and fills stadiums week after week, fail to rise to the occasion?
For Spain, it is the validation of an entire football ecosystem that extends to women's football (it won the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand last year) and which, unlike in the past, does not depend on its two giant clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid, to drive its success.
De la Fuente is a member of the Spanish Football Federation and has coached youth teams for more than a decade, so he has no connection to Spain's club elite. And of course, only two of the likely starters in Sunday's starting XI play for one of Spain's two big clubs. The last time Spain was in a final, in 2012, it was 10 out of 11.
The general view is that in these knockout tournaments, form is more important than level. If so, there is no comparison. Spain have won five of their six games without needing extra time. England have won only two in 90 minutes and needed a 90th-minute winner against the Netherlands. If this were a league format, Spain would have 16 points from six games and a massive six-point lead over England.
Spain have also faced tougher opposition, beating defending champions Italy, hosts Germany and France, the most gifted team in the competition and runners-up at the last World Cup. England's path has been much smoother, still drawing with Denmark and Slovenia, needing a goal in stoppage time against Slovakia to reach extra time, penalties against Switzerland and a controversial penalty against Holland.
Then there is the visual test, and here things get even bleaker for Gareth Southgate’s side. Apart from the first half against Holland (which was followed by a rather dull 45-minute second half), England simply haven’t played well. It’s not just Southgate’s conservatism and his determination to play in transition. That’s a strategy like any other. It’s that they haven’t executed it well at all: they’ve been shaky defensively and have relied on individual moments to score goals at the other end.
Spain, on the other hand, have been attacking, entertaining and largely in control of every game they have played, barring a few periods against Germany and France.
But there is much truth in the cliché that it is not how you get to the final that matters, but what you do once you are there. And that is why Spain cannot be considered big favourites.
The old cliché of defending in numbers and hoping that one of the match-winning players does something special works in one-off games, because this is a low-scoring sport. England, for all the poor performances they have seen so far, are resilient and have a number of players who can turn the tide of games in an instant – from Harry Kane to Jude Bellingham, from Phil Foden to Bukayo Saka, from Cole Palmer to, as the Dutch discovered, Ollie Watkins. It’s not pretty – it means that England, unlike Spain, are less than the sum of their parts and, if this were a league campaign, you’d definitely pick De la Fuente’s Reds over Southgate’s Three Lions. But it’s not.
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Spain coach De la Fuente expects England final to be a “fantastic spectacle”
Spain coach Luis de la Fuente is hoping to face England in the Euro 2024 final.
Southgate knows this and so does De la Fuente. Coaching a national team is something completely different to coaching club football. Players don’t go home to their families after work, they don’t sleep in their own beds, they have no distractions. They’re together for five weeks with 25 other players with a single mission. It’s part special operations, part collective pilgrimage, part reality show with cameras (both traditional and social) and audiences of tens of millions watching your every move.
The way a coach manages his players, his messages both internally and externally, the atmosphere and mood in the camp… all of this takes on enormous importance.
And in this respect, both coaches must be given credit. De la Fuente has been able to take advantage of the low expectations for this Spanish team: fewer big names than in the past (and some of them, like Pedri, are coming off seasons with injury problems), two naturalised French centre-backs (Robin Le Normand and Aymeric Laporte), the latter playing in Saudi Arabia, a centre-forward who generates mixed opinions (Álvaro Morata) and who his club (Atletico Madrid) is trying to sell, and a starting right-winger who won't turn 17 until the day before the final (Lamine Yamal).
And then there is De la Fuente himself, who, despite winning with Spain at youth level (with many of these same players), was unrecognisable to most fans in the crowd until he got the job as top manager. But he has the great merit of knitting together a team, of being positive without grandiloquence (an accusation that may have been levelled at his predecessor, Luis Enrique, now coach of Paris Saint-Germain), of isolating the young and less experienced (such as Yamal and Nico Williams) and of creating a positive feedback loop with the media and the fans at home, who for once have put aside their obsession with Madrid and Barcelona to rally behind their national team. Hell, they are even buying Yamal's Spain shirts, rather than Barca ones, which is telling.
Southgate, now in charge for eight years, has already had the great credit of making England likeable and creating an atmosphere free of the controversy and infighting of old. He has been open and honest with the media and fans and they have reciprocated with support, to a degree: it was Southgate who was mobbed by the media and showered with pint glasses after the disappointing draw against Slovenia.
He has been a target of criticism and a protector of his players. That – and the fact that, in terms of results at major tournaments, he is the most successful England manager of all time – has helped him overcome the fact that he often feels like a chef blessed with the finest gourmet ingredients who simply heats everything up in the microwave, places it on the plate and says “Dinner’s ready!”
But there is only so much of that intangible, off-pitch feel-good factor that can be conveyed. And there is no escaping the fact that his star-studded England team are the favourites seeking international validation. Likewise, his conscious approach (based largely on what he believes worked for Didier Deschamps and France) to safety-first football (he is part fire chief, part Ned Flanders) will only be fully vindicated if England finally win a trophy.
It would be hard to find a more iconic venue for this clash than Berlin's Olympic Stadium, the century-old venue where Jesse Owens broke records, Adolf Hitler raged and Zinedine Zidane, in his final game, headbutted his way to (temporary) infamy.
Berliners wondered what to do with it. Although it predated the Nazis, Hitler and his architects (Werner March and Albert Speer) renovated it to their specifications for the 1936 Olympics. The Nazi icons and symbols had long since been removed, but its very existence, for many, spoke of a dark past. Some wanted it torn down to the ground. Others wanted it left to decay, like the Colosseum in Rome. Instead, they renovated it, in the belief that you can’t escape history, but you can change it (for the better) in the future.
In that sense, it is a more appropriate symbol for England, who as a footballing nation are more burdened by history than Spain, both in this specific tournament, where they have played really badly, and in their history, with the six decades of international disappointment. It is a test not just of the team, but of Southgate's whole approach and spirit. But this is the place where you can break free from the past and write your own story for the future, and that will not be lost on Southgate and his English players. As for Spain, they are playing with house money: whatever happens, their Euros are already a success and they can look to the future with confidence.
