Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The rule has now held for all six men’s football World Cups since 2006. Apart from Croatia and Lionel Messi’s Argentina, every team finishing first, second or third has been western European. This year’s semi-finals pit France against Spain and England against Argentina. How can a region with 5 per cent of the world’s population be so good? I’ve been on a life-long journey to find out.
Western Europeans didn’t start by asking, “How can we win the World Cup?” Instead, they pursued a different goal: making amateur football cheap and widely available. The intended outputs were happiness, community and public health. Winning World Cups was a byproduct.
Lise Klaveness, president of Norway’s football federation, said: “The first priority is to keep football clubs alive everywhere in Norway, regardless of top football. As a federation, we take care of Norway’s kids; that’s what we do. Activation of bodies, compete with friends, be friends with your competitors. I think you would hear it from the national team coach. Maybe it’s a brainwash, but it’s where we come from.”
That’s how I experienced it. I began playing football aged six, in 1976, after moving from London to Leiden in the Netherlands. Most Dutch boys I met belonged to a football club. (The Dutch football federation, like many other leading countries, banned female football until shortly before that time.) European social democracy supported male football: the local council obsessively watered and mowed my club’s only field.
As one of the world’s richest regions, western Europe has been able to afford to pump cash into sport. In Norway, said Klaveness, profits from the state’s betting monopoly were spent on “Norwegian sports and fields”. Children from the poorest families could usually play for nothing, while others paid as little as $10 a year, she said.
The little Leiden region had dozens of football clubs. Some fielded 20 senior teams, seven teams of under-eights and so on. Many people built their identity and social life on being the right-back or linesman of the 14th team. The Netherlands in the 1970s reached two World Cup finals.
Everyone played and understood how to play. Football is geometry — about creating space when you have the ball, and shrinking it when you don’t. That knowledge is all around you in western Europe, unlike in Asia, Africa, the US or Brazil.
Dutch football culture later expanded to include women. In 2017, the average Dutch person lived 1.6km from a football field. Neighbouring Germany’s football federation is the world’s largest sports association, with more than 7.7mn members.
Letting everyone play benefits the national team. That’s because football isn’t basketball or rowing, where you can identify future stars aged four based on body shape. Massive Erling Haaland and little Messi both became great. It’s also hard to predict which teenage prospect will make it. Haaland at 17 was not special, according to Ruben Gabrielsen, his then-captain at Norwegian club Molde. “Not one person in that dressing room can say, ‘I knew all along he would become this good’.” Countries succeed in World Cups by helping every six-year-old develop.
In 1986, I returned to London. British children’s sport was traditionally played in schools, not clubs. But Margaret Thatcher’s government let schools sell about 5,000 playing fields. My school had nowhere to play. A few times, a kindly gym teacher spent his free afternoon taking the “football team” on a long trek to kick a ball around a muddy park. The only match I played while at school was one for pre-game entertainment on Queens Park Rangers’ plastic pitch before a QPR-Norwich fixture. Later, English football was revived thanks to the spread of urban “football cages”, five-a-side pitches and the Premier League’s lucrative rise, which funded England’s world-beating network of professional academies.
As a father, I raised three footballers in Paris, now the game’s deepest talent pool. Almost all Parisian suburbs, or banlieues, have well-kept sports complexes, with artificial fields, used nonstop: at half-time of any amateur game, children storm on to the field for a kickaround. So structured is the system that my son had to earn a coaching diploma to train his little club’s under-eights. His own beloved coach, Mustapha Sangaré, who only joined a football club aged 15, now plays for Bulgaria’s Levski Sofia and Mali. He is far from an anomaly: almost 100 players across all squads in the current World Cup were born in France and just under 70 in the Netherlands.
Western European football’s other strength is what historian Norman Davies called the region’s “user-friendly climate”. Much of western Europe was (until recently) mild and rainy. That means the land is fertile, which has enabled hundreds of millions of people to live crammed together in a small area, while remaining separated into different national traditions. Each country did things a little differently, but they were close enough to learn from each other. England’s Football Association switched children to playing on small fields after studying “the best things around Europe”. The Swiss also borrowed from youth systems across the continent. Norway, after failing to qualify for major tournaments because they couldn’t beat other Europeans, created “national team schools” where the biggest talents spent weekends and summer camps before returning to their hometown clubs.
Learning also happens in regular encounters between Europe’s best adult teams. Tuesday’s semi-final will be the third France-Spain game since the semis of Euro 2024, when Spain’s dominance pushed France’s coach Didier Deschamps to remake his team.
Europe excels at football. If only its system worked as well in fields such as tech, academia or the military.
