Euro 2024 was an intense experience for the players.
You have the eyes of your entire country on you rather than just the fans of your team. In most cases, they were away from home, away from their families and living in the pockets of their team-mates for (if all went to plan) over a month, with little hope of truly disconnecting from the game.
And what’s more, the demands from the media were more intense than ever. There were pre-match interviews, post-match interviews, TV appearances, radio shows, podcasts, YouTube clips and social media platforms from traditional broadcasters, newspapers, websites and whoever else managed to wangle tournament accreditation.
The questioning is often relatively respectful but can be pretty brutal and frankly weird. After Turkey’s defeat to Portugal, their head coach Vincenzo Montella was asked, in so many words, why his approach had been such a failure. Luciano Spalletti, famously confrontational with the media, was forced to apologise after phoning one journalist in the early hours of the morning to let loose in a fairly spicy fashion about a perceived disrespectful line of questioning. On a lighter note, Manuel Akanji dissolved into fits of giggles after his coach Murat Yakin was asked about his status as a sex symbol.
Akanji (right) was left laughing by a question asked of Yakin (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
It’s also interesting to note what players use their appearances in front of the media for. Many will be happy to offer uncontroversial answers and get out of there as quickly as possible, but others take advantage of the public platform.
After Gary Lineker’s criticisms of England’s early games, Harry Kane took the opportunity to ask him and all former players in the media to be a little more positive about things. On a more serious level, the number of French players — in particular Kylian Mbappe, Jules Kounde and Marcus Thuram — who spoke out against the rise of the far right in their country was heartening, even if Didier Deschamps was notably more taciturn on the topic.
At tournaments, the media are given plenty of opportunities to talk to squad members and coaches. Players would be made available after games and on the days between, too: England tended to put two or three players forward on most days aside from the ones on either side of games, for example, and they were not unusual.
This is all voluntary to a point. No team is obliged to do that: the only media appearances made mandatory by UEFA were for managers and whoever was man of the match immediately after each game, and the manager again plus another player before each game, chosen by the team in question.
Players are selected to appear in front of the media for all sorts of reasons, ranging from the logical (the captain, the most senior player, the best player) to the slightly more tangential but still relevant (some connection to the game they’re previewing) to the necessary (they’re the only player that could be persuaded to do it).
It’s interesting to look at who appeared at each team’s mandatory pre-match press conference at Euro 2024. Most teams (17 out of 24) put up their captain at least once: Kane appeared four out of seven times, Mbappe fielded questions about masks and his nose four times, and Albania skipper Berat Djimsiti did all three of theirs. For the completists, the national captains that didn’t were Alvaro Morata, Dominik Szoboszlai, Cristiano Ronaldo, Simon Kjaer, Andriy Yarmolenko and Hakan Calhanoglu.
If not the captain, there’s usually seniority of some form at play. Just over half of the 104 attendees had more than 50 caps before the start of the tournament and only 15 had fewer than 20. The average age was a little over 29. Seven were the oldest player in their respective squads.
Teams tended to start the tournament with their solid choices: for the first round of games, 15 were captains, 19 had 50 or more caps, and 14 were 30 or older. Then things got slightly looser towards the end of the group stage and some slightly more esoteric choices were made. The Czech Republic put forward Vaclav Cerny, who had 16 caps before the start of the tournament, played 55 minutes of their game against Georgia and didn’t get on at all for the game he was previewing, against Turkey. Irfan Kahveci was also invited to set the scene for that game but only played seven minutes in the whole tournament.
Some of the other selections might have looked slightly odd at first glance but did have some logic to them. Turkey put up Salih Ozcan for their opening game against Georgia — not a household name, but he is one of the Turkish players who was born in Germany. Similarly, the Dutch-born Ferdi Kadioglu previewed their game against the Netherlands. Max Mittelstadt went up before Germany’s second group match against Hungary in Stuttgart, presumably because he was their only likely starter who plays for Stuttgart.
A lot of other players were put forward simply because they had performed well in previous games — Breel Embolo was Switzerland’s man for their last group game after scoring in their first, Georgia put forward goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili for their knockout match against Spain after his brilliant performances in the group games.
A few other notes: Hungary put up two players for each of their games, even though they only had to choose one, which was nice of them. Belgium may have had other reasons for putting up Amadou Onana for their final group game against Ukraine, but it did come a few days after he had upbraided a reporter, in a perfect English accent, for calling him ‘Andre’. Most press conferences were held with both manager and player present, but all of Mbappe’s were separate from Didier Deschamps’s, while Luis de la Fuente went solo for all of his; the Netherlands had to cancel their pre-match gathering for the semi-final after becoming the latest to fall foul of the creaking German rail network.
The dynamic between the English players and the media is always a fascinating one. Since the 2018 World Cup, they have attempted to make the atmosphere much more convivial: you’ll have seen the daily game of darts between a player and a journalist.
Which is why the Kane/Lineker incident was slightly surprising.
Kane is slightly different from most modern superstars in that he is pretty happy to speak to the media. Much like players at his level, he’s always in fairly high demand from the broadcast media, for whom he will mostly oblige. But less common among players of his standing is how often he would talk to print journalists. During his Tottenham days, he would very frequently stop in the ‘mixed zone’, an area in the bowels of the stadium, usually between the dressing rooms and the exit, that journalists are permitted to stand and try to persuade players to stop and answer a few questions as they walk out. More often than not the very top players will politely decline or ignore the pleas, unless they have been compelled to talk by their club’s media department, but Kane tends to be more obliging than most.
There is a calculated element to this: by speaking so frequently (and, to be honest, for the most part offering relatively bland platitudes), Kane presents the image of someone open and ‘fronts up’, without actually giving much away. With a few notable exceptions, he has perfected the art of speaking a lot without really saying anything.
It also means that when he does say something slightly punchier, it stands out much more. His speech in response to Lineker was notable not just because it was the national team’s captain ‘hitting back’ at the media, but also because it was slightly out of character.
Kane was also England’s chief ‘fronter-upper’, a role previously associated with Joe Hart, the man to explain bad results and poor performances and solemnly offer home truths. He was the first person from the England camp that the BBC spoke to after the final and asked to explain why they hadn’t seized the initiative in the closing stages, despite the fact he had been substituted after an hour and was on the sidelines for the relevant period.
One notable absentee from England’s round of media duties was Jude Bellingham. He didn’t appear at any pre-match press conferences, wasn’t available to speak at any of England’s other media activities, and didn’t appear on the Lions’ Den YouTube show, organised by England, when most of his team-mates did.
This is not necessarily a criticism of Bellingham: other than when a player wins man of the match (which Bellingham did against Serbia and Slovenia), nobody is obliged to speak to the media and they don’t particularly need to give a reason for not doing so. Speaking to the media is an add-on to the job of a professional footballer, not a compulsory part of it.
What players say in the media and which players talk to the media won’t have much influence on the results of a tournament. Spain won Euro 2024 because they were the best team, not because De la Fuente did his press conferences alone. But in a world where there are more demands than ever from the media, it’s interesting to see how teams handle it.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
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