Once again we have got to the point in the year when I look back to see what I have been talking about in this space. Were there any big trends I anticipated, big stories I foresaw – or was it mostly just a bunch of Monday-morning quarterbacking?
Well, a little from column A and a little more from column B.
As far as bigger trends go, a recurring theme was the creeping sense of homogenisation of top-level football, which many feel is making it less interesting, as preprogrammed patterns push out spontaneity.
The 0-0 draw last March between Manchester City and Arsenal, featuring the Premier League’s two strongest teams and arguably two most controlling managers, stood out as one of the worst examples.
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In that 0-0 draw at the Etihad, Mateo Kovacic produced a lovely drop of the shoulder and jink to sit Bukayo Saka down. The curious thing was, this beautiful piece of improvisation happened near Kovacic’s own corner flag – and hardly anything like it was produced by either team in the attacking thirds. The coaches seem to be discouraging individuals to take those risks in attacking areas when they fear nothing more than the other team launching a 70-yard blitz counterattack.
When Ireland played England in September, Heimir Hallgrímsson talked about how the key thing, for him, was making sure the players didn’t get too excited about it. So a gap is growing between fans, who crave passion (up to and including, let’s be honest, violence), and players who are being trained for calmness above all else.
“The game they’re playing has evolved into an endless flowing sequence of number-puzzles that are better solved with a cool head than the battle-fever we used to think you needed for big matches,” I wrote in advance of that game at the Aviva.
Not that calmness really helped Ireland on the day, when England passed them off the park. When Hallgrímsson’s Iceland beat England in Euro 2016, I wrote, “England couldn’t play football like this. If you gave them the ball, they would give it back to you”.
The antidote to creeping homogeneity was Carlo Ancelotti, who is proud not to have a “fixed identity” and became the most successful coach in the history of the Champions League by winning his fifth title against Borussia Dortmund at Wembley. “[Big Idea Coaches] try to be the hedgehog who knows one big thing, Ancelotti is the fox who knows many things.”
Still, it’s not as though many others can copy the Real Madrid formula for success of employing 12-15 of the most brilliant footballers in the world and having Luka Modric and Toni Kroos in midfield to tell them what to do.
Is the gap widening between Leinster and the other provinces?
The theme of sportswashing returned in 2024, from an unexpected direction. The most spectacular example arose in Germany in May, when the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall signed a sponsorship deal with Borussia Dortmund.
Dortmund fans protested against the deal when their team faced Real Madrid in the Champions League final at Wembley and it struck me as strange that the club would sign an agreement which was always going to prove massively unpopular with their fans when the reported fee was less than €10 million a year. Was this deal part of some larger project of manufacturing consent for Europe’s new “security reality”? “Rather than disparaging [the likes of Rheinmetall] as merchants of death, [fans] must learn to see them as respectable regional employers, export-champions and freedom-enablers.”
I noted that Rheinmetall’s stock price had risen from €96 on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to €527 after seven months of war in Gaza. The shares traded at €617 last week.
Rheinmetall are therefore at least a rare success story coming out of Germany, whose hosting of the year’s biggest football event was dominated by two themes: the host nation’s disintegrating rail services, and Europe’s resurgent nationalism.
I was struck by the sight of the Hungarian fans, before their game against Germany in Stuttgart, engaged in a vast and solemn nationalistic ritual, holding aloft fluttering tricolour streamers as they sang the nationalist power ballad Nélküled.
“Hungary is not the only European country imagining a ‘Greater’ vision of itself,” I wrote, observing that I had also seen fans displaying banners with maps of “Greater” Serbia, Romania and Albania.
There were chants of “Kill the Serb” from the Croats and Albanians and “Kosovo is Serbia” from the Serbs, while the chants of Polish and Georgian fans relentlessly attacked absent Russia.
Austrian, Hungarian and Spanish fans all sang Gigi D’Agostino’s L’Amour Toujours, because of the dance hit’s viral association with the slogan “Ausländer Raus” – “Foreigners Out”. Everybody booed everybody else’s national anthem.
The 24-team format reminded us of its flaws, dragging the tournament out pointlessly. The Ballon d’Or winner, Rodri, picked up an injury in the final on July 14th. If he’d already been on holiday for a week at that point, as he would have been under the 16-team format, maybe he’d still be fit to play football today.
Rodri not snapping his ACL might have prevented the big sensation of the club football year: Manchester City’s stunning collapse over the last two months. Did I see it coming? No.
There are some details from the year’s City coverage which in hindsight seem like foreshadowing, except in that case the writer actually knows what is being foreshadowed. I thought Kevin De Bruyne screaming at Guardiola after he was substituted in a 1-1 draw at Liverpool significant enough to mention, likewise Guardiola shouting into Jack Grealish’s desolate face after a 0-0 draw against Arsenal.
“Afterwards Guardiola kept referring to Arsenal’s ‘physicality’, and maybe there was a hint in this repetition of what he knew his side had been missing.”
But I lacked the insight or maybe the courage to join the dots and proclaim that these signs of weakness and disharmony were the cracks you notice before the whole structure crumbles. At the start of the season there was only a fence-sitting suggestion that “even for Guardiola” five titles in a row might be too much and that City might regret selling Julian Alvarez.
Neither did I anticipate that Arne Slot would start so spectacularly after replacing Jurgen Klopp. My assumption was that whoever followed Klopp would feel like an anticlimax. Instead Slot has showed Liverpool’s players how they can improve and challenged them to become even better. In Rotterdam they say “yeah – we tried to tell you”.
I was at least in advance of the trend whereby Mikel Arteta found himself getting compared to the most unreconstructed ‘proper’ football managers of days gone by. After Arsenal beat Spurs 1-0 in September with a trademark Gabriel header from a corner: “Maybe the real Barclaysman had been staring us in the face all along ... Arteta celebrated with his coaches and somewhere out there Tony Pulis was wiping a tear from his eye.”
