European Championship Stories
In the run-up to the 2012 European Championships, we opted for a different way of telling the story of this particular competition, choosing a story related to each tournament.
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 that ended almost half a century without a major tournament win for Spain, and it marked the calcification...
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 order to fall quickly upon any young player spotted...
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 was a time - a period from the middle to the end of that decade - when the definite feeling...
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 Championships of 1988 and 1992 were the most politically tumultuous since the end of...
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 nations which once pitched up against each other on battlefields, only to find...
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. It turned out to be a match that acted as a barometer for the state of the game in England in several...
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 your skin in the first place isn't difficult but, for all the analysis of tactics and formations which seems...
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 Olympic Stadium in Munich, they lifted the World Cup. Yet it is sometimes said that the team of...
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 1969 Piazza Fontana Bombing in Milan, which killed seventeen people, it was a play...
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 Nations Cup could be regarded as one of international football's ultimate flashes in the pan. This...
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 we like it or not. The game holds such influence over so many people that it sometimes...