The Problem with a European Summer
With the semifinals quickly approaching, Euro 2024 in Germany has been dominating the sports news cycle. Two huge matchups between top ranked teams happen later this week, when England faces Netherlands and France takes on Spain. However, earlier in the tournament, much of the media attention was focused on the star player of one of these teams and his off the pitch comments. In a pre-tournament press conference on June 4th, France talisman forward and recent Real Madrid signee Kylian Mbappe made waves by stating his belief that Euro is a tougher competition to win than the World Cup. Some people argued that Mbappe would know, as he has won the World Cup in 2018 but has never won Euro. They also posit that Europe generally has the best teams, so the concentration of good teams in the tournament is higher than a worldwide tournament like the World Cup. Unfortunately for these supporters of Mbappe’s theory, the data simply does not support this assertion. It can be clearly shown that the World Cup is still the premier international soccer competition.
While no ranking system is ever perfect, some can be quite good. FIFA, the governing body of international soccer, publishes their own rankings of men’s national teams periodically, which follow a solid mathematical formula and are easy to digest, so that is what I will be using for this analysis. Think of the rankings as meaning something analogous to what the AP Poll rankings mean in NCAA basketball and football. A direct comparison is also made easier by the fact that FIFA maintain an archive of their rankings and you can view rankings as of any date in the past decade. In Euro 2024, there were 24 teams participating, with an average ranking at the start of the games of 26.92. In the last World Cup that took place in Qatar in late 2022, 32 teams played with an average starting ranking of 22.06. The World Cup had eight more teams, yet a roughly five place better average ranking, showing a clear trend of difficulty being increased in the World Cup when compared to Euro. This is not a case of outliers skewing the results either, as the median rankings for Euro and World Cup are 23.50 and 19.00 respectively.
An argument can be made that judging the strength of a competition by looking at all teams in the competition can be misleading, as the knockout rounds are when the real tests happen. However, this hypothesis also falls flat. The most recent iteration of both events started knockouts with a round of 16 teams that emerged from group play, making it easy to again directly compare the top 16 ranked teams in each tournament. The World Cup comes out on top once more, with an average ranking of 9.25 and median ranking of 9.50. Euro lags behind with an average ranking of 14.94 and median ranking of 13.00, leaving a similar gap to when comparing all teams and not just the top 16 in each contest.
Overall, I respect Mbappe and what I believe was his attempt to fire up his teammates and motivate them to victory in Euro 2024, but his comments simply do not ring true. I usually do not come to a final conclusion in my pieces and leave interpretation up to the reader, but this case is cut and dry. Maybe everything will change in the future, but it would take a massive concentration of talent flowing to lower level European national teams that currently does not exist. Hopefully, that talent instead flows in to the United States and fuels our run to the 2026 World Cup title as the host nation. We need all the help we can get given our performance this past month in Copa America.