OPINION: Europe has just been through a sweaty, mid-summer month of football fever. It’s not a dreadful disease to suffer through – after all, there’s beer, breathtaking football skills and lashings of camaraderie. But some of the side effects have been disturbing.
Before the European football championships, organised by the Union of European Football Associations, or Uefa, even began, there was talk of another “summer fairytale” here in host country Germany.
This refers to 2006, the year the country hosted the Fifa World Cup in the middle of a heatwave. The hosts came only third but 2006 was the year Germans rediscovered their national pride. Forty years of self-doubt just fell away, one sociologist enthused at the time.
It was also when “public viewings” were invented. The phrase refers to outdoor game screenings. This month, on every balmy street corner, televisions, large and small, have been set up out on the footpaths. Gathered around them in semi-circles is misshapen seating – benches, stools, tattered couches, crates – for viewers who buy bottles of beer, water and wine from the nearest corner shop.
Neighbours and strangers mingle in front of the screens. Every now and then, the street’s outdoor population reacts in unison, sighing into the trees, clawing at the sky or covering their eyes as if doing an impromptu, synchronised dance.
The 2010 World Cup in South Africa had a similar golden glow to 2006. That year, the German team were young, ethnically diverse and beloved by a country that saw a different, more multicultural version of itself on the field. The country felt united behind this new vision.
Sadly, this year’s contest didn’t play out like that, even before Germany’s last-minute quarter-final loss to winners Spain. “It’s just like Woodstock. It can’t be repeated,” veteran sports broadcaster Béla Réthy said during a podcast. “We are very divided, very negative. In 2006, Germany was a different country, more relaxed, more tolerant. Not so dogmatic. Not so demagogic.”
Which brings us to the unsavoury side effects of this year’s football fever. German defender Antonio Rüdiger, a Muslim man of colour, was accused of being an extremist and targeted by the far right after commenting following the win over Denmark that “we did not kill them earlier” after dominating the game.
Meanwhile, a survey commissioned by national broadcaster ARD found 21% of Germans would prefer if their national football team was “more white”. Even more illogically, around the same percentage would like it if the German-born captain, İlkay Gündoğan, wasn’t of Turkish heritage.
At the same time, Germany’s reputation for efficiency was being trashed by transport chaos, when late trains meant international fans didn’t get to games on time. “Euro 2024 and German efficiency: Forget everything you thought you knew,” a scathing headline in the New York Times said. “A national embarrassment,” one German politician called it.
All of the above is likely connected by more than just this football tournament.
Germany’s horribly late trains, once a beacon of efficiency in Europe, are just one sign of crumbling infrastructure and other woes, including an ageing population and outdated auto industry. They speak to the fact that Germany’s grand socialist bargain is no longer being adequately fulfilled.
That’s the deal that says we all pay higher taxes and exorbitant health insurance premiums here, and in return the government takes care of us, ensuring the damn trains run on time, among other things.
So, who should you blame when you can’t get a doctor’s appointment, the trains are late, and you want a simple answer to all the problems far-right parties say they’ll fix? That’s right, “the immigrants”. Even if they might well be – as Antonio Rüdiger was – your most valuable players.
