The age of non-possession

At Euro 2016, teams were less afraid of not having the ball, says Jonathan Wilson

It was not a good Final, but then it had not been a good tournament. So, as time slides by, what will be remembered of the 2016 European Championship?

Wales and Iceland, perhaps? Two underdog stories to warm the heart that will be used by those with a vested interest to justify the expansion to 24 teams – even though both would almost certainly have qualified for a 16-team tournament, anyway.

A weirdly awful penalty shoot-out in the quarter-finals as Germany did everything possible to shake off the stereotype of ruthless efficiency from the spot but beat Italy anyway?

A genuinely epic semi-final in Marseille in which the tournament’s noisiest crowd roared France to victory over Germany.

And a lot of drab, reactive football, based on anti-possession, at which Portugal proved the most adept.

The over-riding lesson of Euro 2016, perhaps, is that it is not even the case any longer that the international game lags behind the club game. They are now so diverse that they are almost different sports, the quality of football played by the best national sides so inferior to that played by the club elite that the hand-wringing over Sam Allardyce’s appointment as England manager and what it means for the long-term future of the English game seems laughably old-fashioned.

The ideal for a national side is for a generation to emerge that are all versed in a similar style of football, whether because of a visionary manager who has overhauled, directly or indirectly, a nation’s youth development, as has happened with Chile and Uruguay, or because they all merged from one or two clubs, something that has recently benefited both Spain and Germany.