Et’s still a long way to go before the national team can win something again. This is not only because the EM is still a long way off. Joachim Löw has proclaimed the Nations League to be a development and protection program, and this is understandable because it is responsible towards the players, that may be: the hearts of the spectators are not so easy to conquer. Insights go beyond results – although that has always been the national coach’s credo on the way to a tournament, he has probably never made it so clear that he doesn’t care much about the results. It will be interesting to see which training program Löw will choose against Switzerland this Sunday in Basel. In the 1-1 draw against Spain, it was more important to him that his team had pressed an hour well than that in the end they took the lead over time. Is that the point of (this) competition?
Not even two weeks after Bayern’s triple frenzy and a widely celebrated Champions League final, football has suddenly arrived in the troubles of everyday life. This includes the realization that, with all his might, he cannot bend the laws of space and time. A lot has to be squeezed into the nine months leading up to the EM. And if someone is wondering at this point whether a Nations League is really needed, the answer is: It needs it because it exists.
The tournament director of the European Football Union (Uefa), Martin Kallen, has calculated that the association would lose more than 100 million euros with every matchday that is not played. The German Football Association, in turn, earns around 10 million euros with every international match, money that it needs in view of the failures caused by Corona. Uefa and with it the national associations were the first to renounce the crisis by agreeing to postpone the European Championship by a year (even if in retrospect no alternative appears conceivable), now they see themselves and their interests in the train. That is legitimate, but, especially when it comes to autumn and winter, it will possibly produce games that, instead of sporting quality, produce some torture. In the great struggle for distribution, physical resources are finite. The price of the pandemic has not yet been paid in football either.
When looking at the personal possibilities, Löw can afford his attitude, in the best case it pays off in the long term. He and his team should just make sure that something else doesn’t accidentally end up on the bill. Finally, as part of the fine print, the results in the Nations League are not entirely without significance. If the German team loses one of the top ten European places in the world rankings due to poor results, the road to the 2022 World Cup threatens to be uncomfortable. That may sound vague at the moment. But the attempt to look particularly far ahead – that has gone completely wrong for Löw and his team.
.
