Friends reunited Football and a troubled continent

Europe is suffering a crisis of identity but for four weeks the Euro 2024 tournament offers a kernel of something pure

- Jonathan Liew

Almost three years ago, at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, the Euro 2024 logo was officially launched, featuring the colours of all 55 Uefa member nations in a symbolic display of continental solidarity. "It shows that in Europe we are united, we are friends," the Uefa president, Aleksander Čeferin, announced of the new design.

"Football is about friendship, it's about good values, different cultures uniting." Friendship. Good values. Everyone united. Yes, good luck with all that.

Perhaps it would be harsh to point out that just a few months after Čeferin spoke these words, Europe would be embroiled in its biggest land war since 1945, a crisis of identity and division from which the continent is still forlornly trying to extricate itself.

Predictions, a mug's game, and all that. But the point to make here is that if football's administrators are going to make these sorts of grandiose, messianic claims then it's only fair to hold them up to the light of reality every now and again.

Is football really about friendship? Is it about good values, different cultures uniting, Xherdan Shaqiri and Aleksandar Mitrović sat round a campfire playing the banjo? Or is it simply the greatest and silliest pastime humanity has yet invented for itself, a seething mass of tribal rivalry, and hollow escapism and performative debauchery set against the backdrop of some of the most sublime athletic feats ever conceived? Let's find out! Fingers on remote-control buttons.

Wallcharts and office sweepstakes at the ready. Fireworks delicately lodged in buttock cracks. Euro 2024 is about to detonate, although not literally, we hope. The prospect of genuine trouble is small but real, driven as much by a populist fetish for "security" and riot gear as by any credible threat.