The needless trend illustrated by Spain v England that is hurting football
Had football kept one simple little fascination, it would be hard not to indulge Declan Rice’s typical enthusiasm.
“You are going away to the Metropolitano, playing the world champions in a game to see who can top the group,” the midfielder said of England’s game in Madrid on Sunday.
“We have a massive motive… to beat Spain as the away team would be a massive thing for us.”
In other words, the benchmark. This is the level England will have to reach to win Euro 2028, as both Rice and Thomas Tuchel expounded on.
Except, for all the grandeur that the midfielder described, Uefa have lessened the stakes.
In the first two iterations of the Nations League, this game at the Metropolitano would not just be a game to win the group but a direct qualification play-off. Only the first-placed teams went through.
And sure, it might not be the World Cup or the Euros, but the very prospect of elimination from a competition that does at least mean something would have naturally made this fixture more compelling.
As it is, with both teams secure in the top two well ahead of Croatia and Czech Republic, there’s a question over whether they will even play their best sides.
None of this is to say the game won’t be as enjoyable as the brilliant September meeting, it’s just that it’s not what it could have been.
And that fits with a needless trend in football right now. The current game apparently has an obsession with safety nets – something to catch the endless bloat.
Everything that could have expanded has expanded.
Uefa themselves started this with the Euros. In 2016, a total of 16 teams became 24, with 16 also going through to the knockout stages. The clean binary symmetry of the old two-from-four groups was gone. A team’s chances of a fourth game were expanded from 50 per cent to 67 per cent, bringing with them the convolutions of the best third-placed sides going through.
More safety nets.
In 2019, the Uefa model was followed by both the Asian Football Confederation and Confederation of African Football, who made the same changes to their continental competitions.
In 2024, it was Uefa’s own club competitions, creating the “football wallpaper” of the Champions League opening stage.
That has obviously had a lot of discussion, including on these very pages, and Uefa do have different reasons for the expansion of the Nations League.
They’re well aware that the old tournament qualification systems of two-year build-ups no longer work, especially because the Euros has expanded. Games were certainly meaning less there. They could see it in the broadcasting figures, and knew they needed to do something.
The Nations League is a smart solution, especially as it serves to constrict qualification to actually make those games more consequential.
And yet they still face the fundamental problem that no international football can come close to the emotional intensity of a tournament, which begs the question of why everyone would constantly seek to move further away from that; why you would seek to ensure more of football is less intense.
It’s when you put all of these together, after all, that you see how widespread this has become.
There are safety nets everywhere, not that football’s authorities would necessarily see it like that.
Most of their reasons are obvious. This is boom time for global interest in football but, far from federations taking the main examples of why it became so popular, they just want to milk it as much as possible.
More safety nets means more games, which notionally means more money… and more, more, more.
Perhaps the big question is whether this will actually affect football’s future? Will it cause classic “market saturation”? Will people… start to turn off?
That feels unlikely in any meaningful way, but there are still a few layers to the answer, that probably requires more data.
Considerable anecdotal evidence now suggests that a lot of people go into some matchweeks – especially in the Champions League and Nations League – without really knowing who is playing. There’s barely even the old anticipation.
That is why it becomes “wallpaper football”. People still tune in, but mostly because it’s there, and it’s football. It’s still enjoyable but it just doesn’t create the same enthusiasm or emotional investment that games of proper stakes do. A certain purity has been clouded.
It’s hard not to think it will start to dilute the same commercial value they’re all desperately trying to maximise, too.
This also stands in such contrast with the intense global interest in the Premier League, precisely because it is perceived as so competitive.
One occasional counter-argument to that is that a domestic league is just the same principle as the Champions League opening stage, but extended… except it isn’t.
In a domestic league, every match – and every moment – contributes to that final position, which is the be all and end all of a season. It is self contained.
In knockout competitions, the primary goal of the preliminary round is just getting to another stage. And, sure, obviously it’s better to finish higher and get more favourable draws, but that’s still all secondary to just getting through.
There are now a lot more safety nets to that. They bring protection for more teams, but pose a touch more risk to the wider game than is considered.
