The final! France - Portugal

[Corvinus85]

5 minutes ago, Lucailduca said:

Yes that's the point of this formula. More teams included, more votes, more money!

At stake? It all depends on the calendar (which means luck). Let's for example look at group E: Italy, already qualified, changed 9 players against Ireland, and lost the game playing the worst game possible. Ireland qualified when clearly they didn't deserve it.

These kind of things happened all the time before, too, it has nothing to do with the expanded format. A team that already has the group win assured will rest as many players as it can. 

Besides, if Italy would have won that match, we would have gotten Turkey in the next round. Not much better.

[baxus]

31 minutes ago, Lucailduca said:

That's a matter of semantics: more doesn't mean better. Quantity is not quality.

To be honest, quantity over time will bring out more quality.

Giving more countries an opportunity to play more high-level opponents will not only bring more exposure to tournament but increase the quality level as well.

It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

EDIT:

That doesn't mean that this new format does not encourage overly defensive play in group stages which makes boring matches.

[mormont]

25 minutes ago, Lucailduca said:

Yes that's the point of this formula. More teams included, more votes, more money!

Yes. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that: it's only bad if the tournament is harmed as a result. But it wasn't.

I know some people are arguing that because Portugal didn't win a group game, that somehow means the whole tournament is damaged by having an unworthy winner. But I can't agree. They weren't the best team to watch, and they were lucky as I've said previously (though that luck is perhaps balanced by the enormous slice of bad luck that is losing your captain and best player to injury in the first part of the match): but there have been worse winners under the old format.

25 minutes ago, Lucailduca said:

At stake? It all depends on the calendar (which means luck). Let's for example look at group E: Italy, already qualified, changed 9 players against Ireland, and lost the game playing the worst game possible.

The sort of match that routinely happens in a top-two only qualifying format, but here we have only one real example of a deliberately weakened team being put out for a meaningless game

Quote

Ireland qualified when clearly they didn't deserve it.

They clearly did.

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That's a matter of semantics

No, it isn't. We're not quibbling about the meaning of a word. You don't think the tournament was better for the change, I do. That's a substantial difference of opinion about the subject, not semantics.

[Consigliere]

I actually like this 24 team format. My biggest concern was that more teams would result in the tournament being watered down but that was definitely not the case. Wales, Iceland, Hungary, NI, RoI and even Albania put up really good showings and proved to be tough nuts to crack. I think that, in the long run, the expanded format giving smaller nations a better opportunity to qualify will prove to be beneficial to those federations and European football on the whole.

Some people seem to be sore that Portugal went on to win the tournament and are blaming the format for that. There's nothing wrong with the format and Portugal are deserved winners. Yes, they didn't play eye catching football but they did enough (just) to get out of their group and then win each of their knockout games. Defensive organisation and a great work ethic are just as, if not more, important than flair. Luck is very often a factor as well and Portugal are neither the first nor will they be the last winners of a major tournament to have had the rub of the green en route to victory.

[Criston of House Shapper]

58 minutes ago, baxus said:

To be honest, quantity over time will bring out more quality.

Giving more countries an opportunity to play more high-level opponents will not only bring more exposure to tournament but increase the quality level as well.

It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

I think, this is a point that gets overlooked. European teams will now have the advantage of more international tournament experience, which will help second-tier-nations, like for example Iceland, if they ever qualify for a WC. Another example is Switzerland, who played their first knockout-stage-match in almost a decade at the last WC and now played another one this year, which will help them in future WC/EC knockout stages, when before they had to make sure they even qualified for the tournament.

28 minutes ago, Consigliere said:

Some people seem to be sore that Portugal went on to win the tournament and are blaming the format for that. There's nothing wrong with the format and Portugal are deserved winners. Yes, they didn't play eye catching football but they did enough (just) to get out of their group and then win each of their knockout games. Defensive organisation and a great work ethic are just as, if not more, important than flair. Luck is very often a factor as well and Portugal are neither the first nor will they be the last winners of a major tournament to have had the rub of the green en route to victory.

I would argue, that Portugal would've beat Hungary, if they really had to. They always played at their best in that match, when they were behind, but obviously didn't care to put up an effort, when the score was level. If they had been out with a draw, they would've made sure to avoid it.

Isn't there also going to be this weird league-thing with divisions soon? What's that about?

Edit: Who's RoI?

[Consigliere]

Republic of Ireland.

[Iskaral Pust]

I don't think the expanded format weakened the tournament.  Tournament soccer overall suffers from a structural problem that defensive play is rewarded (also true of soccer in general as a game, only partially addressed by the move to three-point wins in recent decades).  Although, as they expanded the number of games they could have changed the rules on yellow card accumulation.  For me, the downside of the expansion was too many games to watch and/or care about, but it's easy enough to be a bit selective and just follow a couple of teams you know well.

[StefCurry]

Format doesn't matter, the main thing who got the trophy at the end!
after some time gone, we will remember the name of the winner, but not the format.

[baxus]

8 hours ago, StefCurry said:

Format doesn't matter, the main thing who got the trophy at the end!
after some time gone, we will remember the name of the winner, but not the format.

We will remember Portugal the same way we remember 2004 Greece - not fondly.

Fond memories from this tournament will be Iceland and Wales, definitely not Portugal.

[Lucailduca]

17 hours ago, baxus said:

To be honest, quantity over time will bring out more quality.

Let's hope so, since it is how it's going to be...

Guys, I'll ask you 2 things:

1) How many games were really entartaining during a tournament so long? I mean for the technical quality displayed by both sides, not for the surprise of the outcome, like England-Iceland or France-Iceland/Germany for french fans. I count: Italy-Belgium, Hungary-Portugal (not sure, lot of mistakes) Croatia-Spain, Italy-Spain, Belgium-Wales. That's all. When Germany, Spain, Belgium won 3-0 or 4-0 the match was over in the first half...

2) What's the point of the qualifying tournament? 24 out of 55 UEFA national representatives got to euro 2016 which means, if you don't consider abysmal teams in pot 5 like Andorra, San Marino, Lichtenstein etc. the odds to do it were higher than 1/2. Don't even bother, allow them all!

[baxus]

The qualifying rounds guarantee that weaker teams get to play more games.

If the tournament started without qualifiers those "abysmal teams in pot 5" would get knocked out after two matches. As it is now, they get to play about 10 matches with some opponents who are way out of their league and some they can actually play against and hope for at least something.

[StefCurry]

2 hours ago, baxus said:

We will remember Portugal the same way we remember 2004 Greece - not fondly.

Fond memories from this tournament will be Iceland and Wales, definitely not Portugal.

agree, that  teams just made history for their people! and they were playing unselfness for the country and for the people.

[baxus]

That's one way of looking at it.

The other one is they are teams that did their best to ruin the tournament with their awful play.

We will all look at it in our way.

[lacuna]

4 hours ago, Lucailduca said:

What's the point of the qualifying tournament? 24 out of 55 UEFA national representatives got to euro 2016 which means, if you don't consider abysmal teams in pot 5 like Andorra, San Marino, Lichtenstein etc. the odds to do it were higher than 1/2. Don't even bother, allow them all!

Hey! Words can hurt, you know...

Just because it's true doesn't make it any less painful to hear.

[Criston of House Shapper]

10 hours ago, baxus said:

We will remember Portugal the same way we remember 2004 Greece - not fondly.

Fond memories from this tournament will be Iceland and Wales, definitely not Portugal.

I think the main difference between Greece and Portugal is, that Portugal has come close before, they've been trying to get to that trophy for the last four tournaments and came close every time (losing in the finals, quarter finals and semi finals). So it is rewarding, to see them finally win the title. Greece on the other hand was a one-time-thing.

[baxus]

13 hours ago, Criston of House Shapper said:

I think the main difference between Greece and Portugal is, that Portugal has come close before, they've been trying to get to that trophy for the last four tournaments and came close every time (losing in the finals, quarter finals and semi finals). So it is rewarding, to see them finally win the title. Greece on the other hand was a one-time-thing.

That makes it even worse.

Greece had one way and one way only to win. You can't really blame them for going that way.

Portugal had great players and still resorted to boring the hell out of us all.

[StefCurry]

but we even could see Belgium - Croatia final. this could be very interesting match.. but , it's a pity, Belgium will always stay "potential" team!

[Criston of House Shapper]

On 13.7.2016 at 10:25 AM, Lucailduca said:

Let's hope so, since it is how it's going to be...

Guys, I'll ask you 2 things:

1) How many games were really entartaining during a tournament so long? I mean for the technical quality displayed by both sides, not for the surprise of the outcome, like England-Iceland or France-Iceland/Germany for french fans. I count: Italy-Belgium, Hungary-Portugal (not sure, lot of mistakes) Croatia-Spain, Italy-Spain, Belgium-Wales. That's all. When Germany, Spain, Belgium won 3-0 or 4-0 the match was over in the first half...

2) What's the point of the qualifying tournament? 24 out of 55 UEFA national representatives got to euro 2016 which means, if you don't consider abysmal teams in pot 5 like Andorra, San Marino, Lichtenstein etc. the odds to do it were higher than 1/2. Don't even bother, allow them all!

If you want technical quality, these international games are the wrong thing to watch anyway. I mean, on club level, the teams are much better, because the players know each other better and it's just a much higher level, if they're always playing together for a year or more, vs a couple of times a year for a week and then about 4 weeks every other summer. But, in terms of entertainment quality, I personally enjoyed most of the games. I'm looking forward to the Champions League though, so we can see Real quality.

The qualifying process is a bit of a joke, but so would a 55-teams-tournament be. I don't know, why they have to make 9 groups of 6 and then half of them qualify anyways, it's a bit dull. I would prefer a two-round-knockout-style qualification process, with the worst-ranked teams playing in the first round and the winners along with a couple of other low teams playing against the 23 highest-ranked ones to determine, who qualifies and who doesn't. That way you don't need 10 matches per team, only 2-4 and then you know who's in, you could do that in the autumn before a Euro instead of a two years long sharade.

[Consigliere]

Belgium sack Wilmots. Hopefully the next manager can take this talented side to the next level.

[Jon's Queen Consort]

I just saw it I don't know if it has been posted before. Eric Cantona and his awards;