Cav's Place

I guess it sounds fitting to have 24 teams in Euro 2024, but it’s just too much. It also makes for a weird competition format, with third placed teams indirectly competing with each other in a way that can’t possibly be fair and pairings and routes for the knockout phases that can’t be known ahead of time, but it’s the number itself that’s just too high. True, weaker teams can give everything in the first matches and create some surprises, or at least some interesting matches to watch, while those that fancy their chances tend to take it slowly and may offer less of a show, especially during the group stage, but overall it still seems to me that 16 teams was a fair number.

But I guess it remains to be seen how it will turn out, starting from this evening’s opening match. And opening match results may well be strange, even more so when the host country that plays in that match is one of the better ones in the competition, but the difference in quality between Germany and Scotland lead me to believe that a strange result would be a narrow and more difficult win for Germany, not anything else. And I would consider Germany to be one of the favorites for reaching the semifinals, probably along with England, though I’m expecting them to stop there, with a final between France and Portugal appearing most probable at this point, and the paths through the knockout stages also seem set just for such an outcome. Not that I’m necessarily discounting Belgium or Spain, but they’re probably in the third tier this time around. And I’m tempted to say that Netherlands and Switzerland may be the other two teams to make it past the round of 16, but things are less clear at that level and there may be other options as well.