European Championship Stories: 2008 – The End Of Politics
In Vienna in June of 2008, Fernando Torres broke free from his marker and shot the only goal in the final of that summers European Championships. It was a goal...
Category "Euro Stories"
European Championship Stories: 2004 – Greek Economies Of Scale
As football entered the twenty-first century its race towards full industrialisation had more or less been completed. Resource management had become everything. In club football, scouting networks had diversified in...
European Championship Stories: 2000 – Belgium, The Nearly Men
On the sixth of December 2011, Belgium finally ended a record-breaking run of five hundred and forty-one days without a formal government when new Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was...
European Championship Stories: 1996 – A Whole New Ball Game
It almost goes without saying that the near-death – and very much beyond – experiences suffered by English football during the 1980s shaped the game that we watch today. There...
European Championship Stories: 1992 – A New Europe, But Old Enmities
This, perhaps, was not the new Europe that the leaders of the continents nations had envisaged when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in November 1989. The years between the...
European Championship Stories: 1988 – Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold
There can be few things more tiresome in international football than war analogies. Sometimes, however, they are inescapable and this can be no more true than in the case of...
European Championship Stories: 1984 – Le Veritable Roi Michel
They’ve been playing for one hundred and nineteen minutes on this balmy Mediterranean evening at le Stade Velodrome in Marseille and nothing, so far, has been able to separate the...
European Championship Stories: 1980 – The Decline & Fall Of English Football
On the twelfth of June 1980, England played Belgium in the finals of the European Championships – their first match in the finals of a major tournament for ten years....
European Championship Stories: 1976 – The Birth Of The Penalty Shoot-Out
It has been suggested more than once that the inner beauty of football is to be found in its mixture of simplicity and complexity. For the game to get under...
European Championship Stories: 1972 – West Germany’s Spring Of Absolute Contentment
At the Heysel Stadium in Brussels on the eighteenth of June 1972, West Germany lifted their first major tournament trophy since the 1954 World Cup. Two years later, at the...
European Championship Stories: 1968 – A Rhapsody In Blue
In December of 1970, the Italian playwright Dario Fo released a play entitled “Morte Accidentale Di Un Anarchico” (“The Accidental Death Of An Anarchist”). Based on the aftermath of the...
European Championship Stories: 1964 – A Battle Of Ideologies
If the early history of the European Championships can be seen as explicitly wrapped up in the politics of the time, then Spain’s victory on home ground in 1964 European...
European Championship Stories: 1960 – Cold War Football
There are plenty of people, not least within the governing bodies of football itself, who would have it that football and politics don’t mix. This is, of course, bunkum, whether...