10 Quotes From The Best Euro 2016 Writing: Pre-Kickoff Edition
Photo by Clive Mason/Getty
Great soccer tournaments inspire great journalism. With Euro 2016 kicking off today, some excellent writing about the tournament has already been published. Whether it’s team previews, travelogues, or political analysis, some very smart people have been stringing very smart sentences together to help put the European Championships into perspective.
We’ve collected some choice quotes to writing that caught our eye. Take some time before the Euros start tomorrow to get a sense of what the tournament is about and what’s at stake.
1. “There were a number of people posing by the giant Euro 2016 sign for photographs, wishing, as we were, that the fan zone was already open and the football had begun.”
– Writers for online magazine The Set Pieces visit Lille ahead of the start of Euro 2016.
2. “When Smail Zidane, father of the brilliant French footballer Zinedine, came to France in the 1950s, he worked on a building site in Saint-Denis just yards from the future site of the stadium, and slept there too because he didn’t have enough money for rent. As he lay among the bricks and girders, he could scarcely have dreamed that on that same soil, four decades later, his son would be feted as a national hero.”
– James Gheerbrant explores the mindset among the French, touching on their hopes for a strong showing as well as their fear of more violence in the wake of the Paris attacks last year.
3. “And so most coaches go for off-the-shelf, blockish tactics and the result, often, is stalemate. Perhaps this tournament will be a surprise, perhaps it will develop a free-spirited mood of its own. But international football is what it is: of interest more for reasons of national pride and individual stories than for the innovativeness of the football played.”
– Jonathan Wilson speculates on how Euro 2016 might play out tactically.
4. “‘The game is undergoing a bit of a change and we’re still struggling to catch up. We’ll have to develop strategies to cope’, Siegenthaler said. What he meant is that at the tournament of 24 teams the German side will have to deal with a lot of so-called underdogs trying to emulate Leicester and Atlético.”
– Christoph Biermann on the challenges facing the defending World Cup champions Germany.
5. “Above all, though, Alli has shown the happy knack of being able to seize the moment. In all professional sports there can be talk of potential but there comes a time when it has to be fulfilled; when an individual has to deliver – and the earlier, the better. In a positive omen for Euro 2016, Alli has so far been able to do so.”