euro 2016 | In For The Hat Trick

Three Days. Two Upsets. Zero Practical Significance.

On Saturday, Poland beat Germany 2-0 in a European Championship qualifier. The general consensus seems to be that the match was really, really important: it marked Poland’s first ever victory in a fixture freighted with historical significance and ended Germany’s amazing seven-year unbeaten streak in qualifiers.

But here’s the thing: UEFA’s controversial expansion of the Euros, one of the few international tournaments that consistently features exciting soccer, pretty much guarantees that powerhouses like Germany and Spain, which lost 2-1 to Slovakia on Thursday, will qualify. This week’s upsets were exciting to watch – but in terms of the Road to France ’16 (or whatever we’re supposed to call the qualification campaign), they were completely meaningless.

Unfortunately, It’s That Time of Year

The September international break is universally despised. It inaugurates a new round of boring qualifiers, brings the daily news cycle to a standstill, and forces fans to wait two weeks to see their teams’ deadline-day signings in action. Moreover, most of the games take place on Monday or Tuesday, so the first weekend of September is almost always devoid of soccer.

During this summer’s World Cup, sports fans stayed glued to the television as star players competed for a prestigious title. Last week, England played Norway in a half-empty Wembley stadium, and virtually no one watched on TV. That’s the great irony of international soccer: for a few weeks every four years, it attracts hundreds of millions of viewers, many of whom aren’t even soccer fans – but the rest of the time, it’s kind of a drag.

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Three Days. Two Upsets. Zero Practical Significance.

Unfortunately, It’s That Time of Year