Okay. It's a small world, but, as the joke goes, you wouldn't like to have to paint it. It's been made all the smaller in football terms by the unremitting influence of Europe. In the global village of football Europe is the university campus. Players come here to learn and to earn. The philosophy and style of European football has thus been disseminated everywhere. And the championships which crop up every four years here on campus have become the best football tournament on the planet.

You demur. Fine. You prefer the bloated caravan of fun that is the World Cup. Well, sure. We'll spot you the loss of the Brazilians and a cartload of cliches about samba soccer, etc, etc. We'll take the hit of missing out on the Argentinians and their lovely fans, who are generally less disappointing than their team is. And the African surprises. We'll miss those.

We'll still stand the argument up though. Pound for pound, game for game, the European Championships are the best tournament in soccer.

It's not just the pre-eminence of the European leagues, the top half-dozen of which are superior to anything else on earth and which serve as a magnet for every great or aspiring player not born on the Continent anyway. Such is the influence of the European way of football that the global nature of the World Cup has become diminished. The great players play European football. The great non-European teams just add a twist.

Funny, but nobody actually plays like Brazil did in 1970. Lots of people play like Italy did in 1970.

There is, of course, no way to measure objectively the quality of a tournament, but if you were to draft a committee to deliberate and bring back some sort of mathematical formula, their equation would involve the ratio of great games to games played (the European Championships inevitably come out on top), and a subtraction of the hype (the bigger hot-air index would be for World Cups), all expressed as a function of the different narrative strands (this figure would, of course, be a variable).

The World Cup has surrendered something to giganticism. There has been a loss of focus, a sense of the size of the thing just overwhelming us. So many teams, so many groups. In a 32-team field the quality tapers off in an odd sort of way. We get fine, romantic break-out stories like the South Koreans and Senegal in 2002, but their achievements are diminished slightly when we go back and do the forensic work on the groups which they come through. Later, we examine how quickly they went back into recession when the competition ended and we shake our heads.

The European Championships, still indisputably less prestigious than the World Cup, can make a more-than-decent claim, however, to being a better tournament. The quality of the group play is more urgent and more compelling than almost anything we get in the World Cup. The number of meaningless matches is minimal. The number of whipping boys allowed through the gate is minimal. The focus allowed by a 16-team tournament is optimal.

The quality of the winning sides in recent times has been excellent and the stories they have thrown up have been wonderful. 1984? For us it was Platini versus Dunphy and the nuance that distinguishes good players from great players. France won.

The argument never ended. 1988: a tournament which got its quality certificate early on when Ray Houghton put the ball in that other team's net. And then Ireland played possibly the best football we have ever played at a tournament to draw with Russia next time out. We succumbed to the Dutch, but the quality of van Basten's winner in the final that year copperfastened the dignity of our exit and the quality of the competition.

1992, and Denmark were summoned at the last minute to replace Yugoslavia and found themselves free of any hang-ups or pressures and with a team laden with extravagant talents. They won the thing!

1996 in England. Once Gareth Southgate eliminated the chances of England actually winning the championship we could relax and see it for what it was: a cracking tournament with Germany winning via a golden goal from Oliver Bierhoff, the donkey they brought to the derby.

Finally to Euro 2000, where the quality was higher again and the French established themselves as one of the great modern teams.

There's not a dud tournament in there. Can you say the same about the last five World Cups? Pick out any one of the four groups which begin to unfold in Portugal today. Set that group down into a World Cup competition and watch. Instantly it becomes "The Group of Death". We know for certain that from, just say, Group A, two teams from Spain, Portugal, Russia and Greece will have their toes tagged in the mortuary of first-round failure. That's grimly compelling even for the non-partisan.

And what of the other strands, those back-stories? Can the big boy from Brazil, Phil Scolari, make his magic work on the aging golden boys of Portuguese soccer? Has Figo's late-season return to form been timed to perfection, or will injury hinder him?

Beckham? Blow away the golden dust sprinkled by a legion of pony-tailed flunkies with certificates in marketing and do you see much more than a very good right-sided midfielder? Place him beside the undermarketed Steven Gerrard and do you see a total or partial eclipse of goldenballs? And England as a whole? Is Sven-Goran Eriksson not just a symptom of the Beckham syndrome, a man less than the sum of all the wishful thinking which surrounds him?

You know you have a decent tournament in prospect when an Italian team with Totti and Nesta in it can make a credible claim to being dark horses. Or when a Spanish squad which has had the luxury of being able to leave out Reyes are finally being told by people who have torn up too many betting slips that they are no longer dark horses for every tournament they go to. This time they are outsiders.

The French. Zinedine Zidane saying goodbye in a season where he has, by his standards, been poor, but has been, by his own words, prioritising his international football.

The Dutch. Are they the side which hammered six past Scotland or the team played off the field by Brian Kerr's youngsters?

There's more. The Swedes are more scantily regarded than is proper for a side with Larsson, Ibrahimovic and possibly the impressive midfielder Kim Kallstrom as their cutting edge.

And so it goes. Every team, with the possible exception of Latvia, whose presence is a welcome touch of romance, can make their claims. The big players, the icons and the idols all come in varying states of repair, many looking for a memorable moment to wave their goodbyes.

And finally, the geography. The World Cup has become unmanageable. Twice recently it has been spread over massive geographical areas (the US, Japan and South Korea), and each part of the tournament has existed almost independently of the other. Only in comparatively compact France has there been a sense of festival.

The European Championships (fittingly!) always take place in Europe. Fans are cheek by jowl. The trains to games are great melting pots of excitement. Portugal, with the games being played up and down the nation's spine, is the perfect host. Breathtaking stadiums, gorgeous weather and a footballing history spangled with great names and memories.

Priceless. Incomparable. Get back to us in a month if you're not satisfied.