“Why are they there?”: How to reply to international football elitists
In the upcoming Euro 2024 qualifiers, there will be games where one of the world’s best
international teams comes up against a so-called “minnow”. Portugal-Liechtenstein and
France-Gibraltar come immediately to mind, while most Maltese fans will admit that the
games against England and (possibly) Italy are going to be heavy going. Football fans
looking for sportsbooks at wishcasinos.com certainly won’t be doing it in order to back the
smaller sides, and there is a decent chance that someone is going to be on the receiving
end of a ten-goal margin or more.
When this happens, there will be more than a few pundits in the larger nations who look at
the result and ask why teams like Gibraltar, Liechtenstein, Andorra and, yes, Malta are even
in the qualifying pool. “It can’t be much fun for them” will be a common remark, before they
reveal their real reasoning by pointing out “and we don’t learn anything from it”. As well as
pointing out to these pundits that smaller teams are there because they’re European nations,
it is always helpful to have a few responses to hand. Here are some such replies.
Smaller nations occasionally do better than expected
Latvia in 2004. Albania and Iceland in 2016. Even - at the time - Ireland in 1988. All of these
teams were patronised as weaker nations, and all of them qualified for the Euros. Iceland
made the last eight before being knocked out by the hosts. In the kind of closed paddock
that some pundits seem to want, none of the above could have happened, yet Ireland beat
England, Albania beat Romania, and Latvia pushed Germany to the limit. Does anyone ask
why Norwich City are allowed to play in the Premier League when they always get relegated
from it and never exceed expectations in the above way? Weirdly, no.
We’re not going to improve just playing each other
The Nations League has been a positive development - unless you’re San Marino or
Andorra, who simply get more regular reminders that they are minnows among the minnows.
It has allowed teams from smaller nations to play competitive football matches that they can
win more often. But if this was all that there was for us smaller footballing nations, then we’d
remain good enough to beat each other and never get any better than that. As annoying as it
may be for the larger nations to have to sully themselves by playing us, fans are more likely
to show up to see a Harry Kane or Kylian Mbappe when they show up in Malta than anyone
from a “minnow” nation - and playing the best can be a learning experience.
Take lessons from the past
Even into the early 1990s, the Turkish national football team was one that fans from other
nations loved to be drawn against. They regularly found themselves on the receiving end of
scorelines from 5-0 to 8-0, a score they had inflicted on them in 1984 and 1987 by England.
By 1996, they were qualifying for the Euros, and in 2002 they won the Bronze Medal match
in the World Cup. Had FIFA cut them out of the qualifying picture after they got thrashed by
England for a second time, they’d have missed out on a pretty incredible achievement just
15 years later.
The moral of the story? Keep us smaller teams around, you never know when you might get
a surprise.
Henry
just love writing about football and playing video games, love my quiet time also. contact me @ [email protected]
