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International friendlies were a much maligned beast that was so often prefaced with ‘meaningless’ but at least you knew where you stood with them. Every six weeks or so they reared their head like a pub bore butting in on a brilliantly funny and engaging conversation and a nation sighed and waited them out.
They were necessary, we kidded ourselves. Our national team coach needed to assess whether an in-form Crystal Palace midfielder could cope with eight short minutes against Costa Rica while a singular training session was ‘bonding’ for a tournament two years hence.
So in this tedious vacuum we made the best of it. We tuned into ITV for the first time in ages to be reminded of how god-awful their coverage is and have a few chuckles by mercilessly slating Glenn Hoddle on Twitter. We passed the time by deluding ourselves that the new centre-back pairing for England was relatively intriguing and studiously ignored the 27 substitutions made in-game.
We smiled politely when the country of our origin finally broke the deadline late-on largely due to possessing better fitness levels and when an Estonian brute nobbled our club’s star man with Champions League commitments on the horizon only a flicker of the eyelids portrayed our true feelings.
We did all of this while counting the days until Premier League football returned. Football that actually mattered.
That though is all in the past because now we have the UEFA Nations League, a concept intended to add meaning to international friendlies; a structure to the irrelevant. All hail our benevolent overlords for the gifts they bestow us.
Should you remain in the dark concerning the brand spanking new competition just a short couple of days before its inaugural evenings don’t fret because you’re hardly alone. Across social media fans and bloggers alike are asking aloud what the hell it is that we’re about to be subjected to while admitting to utter confusion as to its convoluted format. When the sheer stupidity of its intentions are factored in too the Nations League is a shambles on every conceivable level and given that it hasn’t even started yet that is quite some achievement.
In short – because to explain fully is only to perplex further – every European nation has been split into four leagues dependant on their ranking. Each league is divided into four groups of three or four teams who play one another home and away in the months ahead. After a series of semi-finals and a play-off final ultimately the winner of each league contests a mini-tournament held in the summers that lie in between World Cups and Euros. All four league winners are granted automatic qualification for the Euros. The winner of the mini-competition is crowned the UEFA Nations League champion.
The shorter explanation is that it is a farcical creation almost entirely precipitated by pure greed and to sate UEFA’s need to fill every conceivable gap in the footballing calendar.
“Football never stops,” UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin recently trumpeted in a missive designed to talk up the Nations League and it’s a claim that unsettles. Professional sportsmen need breaks, even if that only consists of two weeks sunbathing on a Dubai beach, while the over-saturation of football is a genuine threat to its popularity.
“The World Cup showed that there is a huge appetite for national team football,” Ceferin continued. “UEFA has always been aware of this and of the fact that national team football needs more than biennial summer showcases”.
Here he wantonly misses the point quite spectacularly. World Cups are embraced so fervently because they are biennial; because they are special. More so, there is a huge difference in cheering on England in a semi-final of the greatest show on earth to watching them depleted against Croatia in a game that’s a friendly in all but name, a game incidentally whose main objective is redundant because both sides will surely have already qualified for the Euros via conventional means.
Which brings us to the Nations League’s biggest failure, because should a team make it to the last four play-off from each respective league after already qualifying for the Euros their spot will be taken by another (unless they also have qualified in which case the depths are plumbed until a team is found that has missed out) and this has led to criticism of the competition being a second-chance saloon for the bigger countries. Frankly, this charge is incontestable. Frankly, for a Holland or Italy to miss out on a major tournament moving forward they will have to play all their games in bare feet or employ Tony Adams as their coach.
“The relationship between club and national team football needed rebalancing,” Ceferin concluded. It’s a statement that makes precisely no sense and is entirely empty of meaning. Which makes it the perfect summation then of the unwelcomed, un-asked for, and completely unnecessary Nations League.
[brid autoplay=”true” video=”289180″ player=”12034″ title=”A Futsal Player Walks Into A Denmark Squad…”]
