European Championship Round of 16 France – Belgium: Anti-football? Can the Belgians now

It is quite common for football teams to lose games that those involved later say they should have won. If, yes if… there was such a thing as justice on the football pitch! But rarely has this complaint been voiced with as much helpless fury as in July 2018 in Saint Petersburg.

Appearance of world goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois after his Belgians’ 0:1 defeat in the World Cup semi-final against France: Courtois stood in the catacombs of the Gazprom Arena, shocked, as if the football devil had appeared to him in person. But it was only the Frenchman Olivier Giroud, the alleged centre-forward of the French, who had continued to write his bizarre statistics in his sixth World Cup game: more than 700 minutes of football, zero shots on goal! But Giroud had won several challenges at his own corner flag, constantly disrupted the Belgian build-up play – and in between, centre-back Samuel Umtiti had headed the ball into the goal for the winning goal. Belgium was out. Courtois was beside himself.

Of course it is “the French right to play like that”, ultra-defensive and without any aesthetic pretensions, he complained to the reporters, “but it is not pretty! This eleven is no better than ours! I would rather have been knocked out by Brazil than by these French.” A few meters away from Courtois stood Eden Hazard, also a big name in international football at the time, and defiantly suggested that there was a moral obligation to go down in beauty rather than win ugly: “I would rather lose with this Belgium than win with this France,” said Hazard. At the time, the Belgians were sticking a warning sign on French football, a fighting term that Courtois had thought up and which Blues should follow for a while: Beware, “anti-football”!

Anti-football? The national coach Didier Deschamps was happy to refer to this five days later, after his French anti-footballers had also won the final and he was asked what message this sent out, what trend this new world champion was setting. “Are we a good world champion?” asked Deschamps: “I don’t know. We are world champions. For the next four years we will be on top of the world.”

Belgium’s “golden generation” has already lost some of its most prominent representatives without winning any titles

Even today, many in Belgium believe that the 2018 World Cup title was illegally stolen from them, and that FIFA crowned an anti-football world champion instead of the real football world champion in Russia. (These Belgians assume that they would have won the final against Croatia.) The French sports daily The Team has started a small series, title: On the roads of “seum”on the trail of “rage”. “seum” is a code for the semi-final in Saint Petersburg, because of the Belgian furore. One of the trails leads a reporter to a bar behind the Brussels Palace of Justice: a fat policeman, an undertaker and a former politician who is now a waiter are sitting there together – and what starts as a joke ends with one. “You stole the 2018 World Cup from us,” says the undertaker. But at the 2024 European Championships, Belgium will play “like the French did at the 2018 World Cup: everyone at the back”.

This is the irony that must now be faced by someone who, back in 2018, was still playing in the Champions League as coach of FC Schalke 04: Domenico Tedesco, 38, Belgium’s national coach from Esslingen, Baden-Württemberg. Fast forward six years from Saint Petersburg and you see the Belgians in the European Championship stadium in Stuttgart after a 0:0 draw in the last group match against Ukraine, in which a goal conceded up to the last minute would have meant an early exit. Kevin De Bruyne, today’s star and captain of the team, shuffles towards the Belgian curve, but the chorus of whistles is so shrill that De Bruyne signals to his colleagues: We’re turning around! He wants to retain a little bit of dignity for himself and the team, although after really bad games it’s actually part of the job to at least face the paying customers.

Long-time captain Eden Hazard has ended his career in the summer of 2023, and Thibaut Courtois will also not be there when the Belgians face France again on Monday (6 p.m.), this time in Düsseldorf, in the round of 16 of the European Championship. Courtois has not ended his career, but has fallen out with Tedesco. The much-vaunted “golden generation” of Belgian football has already lost some of its most prominent representatives without winning any titles. And now?

Play, play well? We want to win! The French sound like 2018 again

Before the reunion in Düsseldorf, the French are trying to sound like they did in 2018, for example Real Madrid midfielder Aurélien Tchouaméni recently in the quarters in Bad Lippspringe near Paderborn: “For those who want to see a very nice game, we may not be the best team,” he said, “but we are the team that most often finds itself in the last four. And that is what counts.” There are many of the lessons of Didier Deschamps, who was the captain of the French team at the 1998 World Cup title. Blues and already then declared that he played football “never to play, but always only to win”.

But the French, like the Belgians, are still searching for their centre at this European Championship: concentrated and combative, but often hopelessly ineffective and clumsy, and also irritated by the broken nose of striker Kylian Mbappé, who is now playing with a mask. What seemed like a brilliant plan in 2018 – minimalism in play with maximum defensive stability – only led to the title in the end because someone scored the decisive goal, in doubt a centre-back from a set piece. In three European Championship games, the French have only scored one penalty and one own goal by an Austrian. French team has not yet presented itself as a title favorite – on the one hand.

On the other hand, with the French, unlike the Belgians, every generation is a golden one in terms of talent. For Kylian Mbappé, the World Cup in Russia was the first major tournament, and when he stood in the belly of the St. Petersburg stadium after the semi-final, he too had an explanation for this ugly but effective 1-0 win against the beautiful but ineffective Belgians: “There were eleven dogs on the pitch today.”