Euro 2024 tournament director on his ambitions for next summer, football’s money problem and why Germany’s men’s team fell away
Philipp Lahm looks at the land where he lived for a decade and a part and allows the memories to return. It is June 2006, the first day of a long, torrid and transformative summer that brought the world to a modern Germany that is open to the outside world. He was worried about missing the opening match of the World Cup at the Allianz Arena after elbow surgery and felt a sense of quiet euphoria at the prospect of being declared fit to play. The excitement was total when, six minutes after kick-off. , beat two Costa Rican defenders and scored a sensational goal that got the festival underway.
“The referee had to test my splint in the dressing room right before the match,” he remembers. “When he said, ‘Yes, no problem, you can play’, that was the greatest thing. I was born about five kilometres away from here, my whole family was in the stadium and many friends too. I didn’t score many, so the goal was a very special moment for me. I released all my joy and didn’t know what to do with my feelings.”
At 22 Lahm could never have predicted that, 17 years after firing the starting gun on one of football’s showpieces, he would be charged with organising another. He is the tournament director for Euro 2024, which Germany will host next summer, and the fruits of his labour will begin to crystallise after the draw takes place at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie on Saturday. Lahm’s life used to involve crisscrossing the continent with Bayern Munich and an all-conquering national team; now he can pour forth regarding the ins and outs of site visits, venue checks, discussions about infrastructure and fine-tuning details with sponsors.
He also knows the extent to which a football tournament can change prospects forever. In 2006, Germany was still finding its way after reunification and dealing with the scars of World War II. “Those were special weeks,” says Lahm. As a society, we grew back together, became more connected, and were able to offer ourselves to the world. We may simply show others who we are. We have a history in Germany that is not very positive, but everyone knows us in a new way.
When is it? From 5:00 p. m. to 9:00 p. m. GMT in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie corridor. The hosts are Pedro Pinto and Esther Sedlaczek; the music comes from tenor Jonas Kaufmann, violinist David Garrett and 3 ensembles. The draw is expected to last 20 minutes; BBC Two’s policy starts at 5. 15pm.
The Six Teams of 4 format. 21 of the 24 finalists are known, 3 of whom will come out of the playoffs next year. We’ll talk more about that later. Each team was allocated one of the 4 pots (1, 2, 3, 4) based on their effects on the rankings. Six other pots, A, B, C, D, E and F, will determine their position in their group. host, automatically occupies position A1.
Pot 1 Germany, Portugal, France, Spain, Belgium, England2 Hungary, Turkey, Romania, Denmark, Albania, Austria3 Netherlands, Scotland, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic4 Italy, Serbia, Switzerland and the 3 play-off winners. Play-offs Twelve teams were a success and were divided into three paths to reach their final position in the Nations League. The matches will be as follows: Semi-finals on 21 March 2024 Route A Poland vs Estonia, Wales vs Finland B Israel vs Iceland, Bosnia and Herzegovina vs Ukraine C Georgia vs Luxembourg, Greece vs Kazakhstan Finals on 26 March.
Berlin’s Olympiastadion will host the final. They include Leipzig, Munich, Hamburg, Dortmund, Cologne, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Gelsenkirchen and Düsseldorf.
Save the dates June 14 Opening match at the Allianz Arena in Munich – Germany vs. A2. June 29 Start of the knockout phase July 9 and 10 Semifinals July 14 Final, Berlin
Lahm tells the story of a fan in the crowd, still in that room, who couldn’t hold back tears as the national anthem was played before Germany’s victory over Sweden in the round of 16. It’s not an isolated scene. ” In the first game, other people dared to wave the national flag and sing the national anthem,” he said. “Before, it wasn’t general, but it’s replaced thanks to football and its values. That’s what can make a wonderful occasion. “And next year we have a wonderful opportunity to create a network across Europe in the same way.
These are not the platitudes of a politician or a bureaucrat. Lahm saw it all with his own eyes at the time, setting the course of history with a dynamic German team that finished third under Jürgen Klinsmann. The players and the country fed off We parted ways and rode the wave together. “We were a smart team, but without that enthusiasm we wouldn’t have been able to get this far,” he said. Outsiders have discovered a lightness and warmth that was unimaginable to explore. freely before; in Munich, the centrally located Marienplatz would become its own league of friendly and sometimes pleasantly drunk countries. German football would become a style on and off the pitch; An elegant movement of strength between generations culminated in a World Cup victory eight years later.
The demanding situations are different now, and not just because Germany wants to find their way back temporarily after unthinkable eliminations in their last three tournaments. War rages in Europe on a scale not seen in three-quarters of a century, and no one is taking it seriously. believes that a month of football will either bring victory to Ukraine or suppress far-right extremism; The sport itself has changed, its relationships with money and geopolitics have become so tight that the first occasions have become comfortable force cars for the dizzyingly rich.
“Earlier in my career football was still unencumbered, so to speak, in contrast to nowadays,” Lahm says. “Today you have completely different issues with money and the situations we saw around Qatar for example.” He was strident last year, writing in these pages, in calling the hosting of the 2022 World Cup a “mistake”; he has similar concerns about the waving through of Saudi Arabia’s 2034 bid and fears football’s cultural value is being tainted.
“If you look at Qatar and Russia, football has been used partly in a negative sense,” he says. “But we want to take advantage of the big occasions to show our own values, to reflect how we want to live together in Europe. Football For me, it’s also about culture and tradition. None of this simply existed in Qatar.
“Football shouldn’t just be about making money. It is for children, teenagers, lovers of amateur play, culture, amateurs. I would give a tournament to a democratic country. We have to make sure we take advantage of next summer to get stronger. “to strengthen Europe. “
It’s not hard to see how Gerguyy, with its historic stadiums and deep sporting legend, can become a breath of fresh air in the midst of tournaments whose rewards range from the most questionable to, in the form of delays and Covid-19. Euro 2020: it’s simply diversity. Lahm, a boy from a club that has grown rich from football but has never succumbed to its airs and pretensions, is a pleasantly rustic ambassador. She needs to throw “a big party where everyone feels good” and she needs young people like her son Julian. , which continues the family culture through the game for the grassroots club FT Gern, to be sure that top-level football remains within everyone’s reach in the most exclusive climates.
“The challenge is that he’s 11 years old and he’s never realised that the German national team is successful,” Lahm grimaces. This reminds us in the dressing room of their near miss in 2006: wonderful figures such as Jens Lehmann, Oliver Kahn and Michael. Ballack was complemented by youngsters Lukas Podolski, Bastian Schweinsteiger and Lahm himself. When the elders later retired, those tyrants mobilized to form a nucleus that would sustain the peak of the next decade. Lahm retired from foreign football after leading them to global supremacy in 2014. And he believes his recent troubles are due to a failure in succession planning. There were no strident personalities waiting.
Sign up for Football Daily
Start your evenings with The Guardian’s take on world football.
After the Newsletter
“After the World Cup success I don’t think we really worked on it,” he says. “They didn’t make the new generation responsible for the team. You need a core, a heart, for people to know who is in charge, and it didn’t develop automatically. There were a lot of changes but the core I’m talking about never took shape.”
This has led to a dramatic fall from grace: departures from the organizational level in 2018 and 2022; quite a defeat against England in the second round of Euro 2020. A team consisting of Serge Gnabry, Leroy Sané, Ilkay Gündogan, Joshua Kimmich and Antonio Rüdiger has no business as equals. Julian Nagelsmann, who arguably would have staked his career on winning over such a vital role in the national team at the age of 36, took over in September, but last month’s friendly defeats to Turkey and Austria were a setback. Lahm said last year that the good fortunes of Euro 2024 would depend on Germany’s functionality in Qatar: if this remains the case, the carnival atmosphere in the country may also be seriously diluted.
“He’s a very charismatic coach with a transparent concept of how to play,” Lahm said of Nagelsmann. “You can never say how the pass will turn out, but of course I’d like it to be a turning point. “”Well, we have the players for that. We are a football country and so it will be. People believe that with the enthusiasm of the country, with the joy of 2006, we can go far. “
It’s not that Lahm is too preoccupied with provincial matters. Listening to him talk about a variety of issues plaguing football today, namely the pressure placed on players due to a congested calendar and the German Bundesliga’s desire to zealously respect its “50:1” ownership rule, it’s natural to wonder. what will happen after the curtain falls on Euro 2024 on July 14 in Berlin. Lahm is coy about the future, unless he confirms he intends to stay in football, but he looks like the down-to-earth kind of manager – in fact, drenched in football. that the game he loves cries out for.
The immediate task, however, is to deliver a summer that extols the virtues of foreign competition, a scenario he has tackled with particular pleasure, at a time when club football is under increasing pressure. “They have the most productive leagues, they’re the ones that make the most money and that’s how club football has developed,” he says. “But for me a national team is something else. It shapes an entire nation. When I think back to 2016 with Iceland, 2021 with Denmark or Croatia in the last two World Cups, it’s amazing to see smaller countries achieve such success.
Lahm religiously observes the playoffs: he wonders if in the playoffs, which will complete the lineup three months after the draw, there will be one or two new calls to the powerful who are hoping for a benevolent step on Saturday. He wonders whether, at the back of the stadium, someone will stick with him and write his decision down in history when Germany play another opening match here on June 14. And he’s hoping for a summer at least equivalent to the one that propelled his career into the stratosphere.
“It has to be safe, that’s the most important thing, nothing bad should happen,” he says. “Then, I want people to come together to celebrate. Football is always a reflection of society and I firmly believe it can build bridges.”