Spain and England will close a month-long football festival with the Euro, where old and existing icons have fallen while new stars have emerged.
The European Championship was first held in 1960, when the former Soviet Union beat Yugoslavia 2-1 in Paris.
The last final resulted in England losing at home, which is a great position to start taking a look at some of the highlights from the last few European Championships.
Just as in 1996, when England reached the semi-finals of the European Championship, the chant of football “coming home” echoed again in the hills and valleys of England. After 120 grueling minutes, on the hallowed pitch of Wembley Stadium in London, United Kingdom, it was Italy who won the Euro 2020 title in a heartbreaking defeat for England.
Three young lions had been the heroes of the tournament for Gareth Southgate’s side, and icons of a new generation of English hopes and dreams, so it is the cruelest of ironies that Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho missed their penalties. Luke Shaw, who, along with Saka, hopes to start against Spain on Sunday, opened the scoring in the second minute of the match, but Leonardo Bonucci equalised midway through the second half. Saka, who was then only 19 years old, crying in the field, but faced much worse situations when he left the field.
The Arsenal striker and his team-mates who missed their shots were subjected to a torrent of vile racist abuse on social media that shocked all of England in the days that followed and largely outweighed the deflation of sentiment on the ground. For Italy, this continued a 34-match unbeaten streak to win a second European crown.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s moment had probably come in the 2016 final, when he was looking to translate his illustrious club career to foreign level with Portugal. The then Real Madrid ‘Galáctico’ scored three goals to help his country advance to the final against France, but he was forced to limp off 25 minutes into the match due to an injury.
With him came the Portuguese dreams against a French team, which would win the World Cup two years later.
But Paul Pogba, Antoine Griezmann and Olivier Giroud were on the left side after Eder’s goal in the 109th minute. The French had dominated all other statistics, but it was Portugal who won their first European Championship, making up for the pain of the 2004 final defeat to Greece.
Their most notable victory came in 2012, when they beat a tough Italian team.
Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona had returned to the top of European club football for more than a decade, while Serie A powerhouses were in decline. The Italian foreign team, however, continues to shine with the Colosseum gladiators who yearn to return to their former glories.
The masters of defensive stability remained in position in defense with Gianluigi Buffon in goal and Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci as a point guard in front of him. In midfield, Andrea Pirlo remained the master and commander of the Italian legions.
The strength of European football was advancing across the Mediterranean to the southwest of the continent, where the masters of “tiki taka” football were now playing their own game. With the Barça duo formed by Xavi and Andrés Iniesta and with Real Madrid’s Xavi Alonso pulling the strings in midfield, the impossible Spanish resistance destroyed the Italians in all areas.
John Jensen scored the first goal after 18 minutes to alert everyone that there could be an upset before Kim Vilfort settled the equalizer with 8 minutes remaining.
When Lamine Yamal made a brilliant effort from outside the box to beat Germany and send Spain to the final on Sunday, a star was born and some other dazzling goals were added to the list of wonderful European and global goals. Perhaps the most outstanding of all the European Championship came in the 1988 final, when Marco van Basten unleashed a thunderous volley from the edge of the box to double the Netherlands’ lead over the then-USSR in Germany.
Ruud Gullit’s dreadlocks and opening head also have iconic photographs deeply rooted in Dutch folklore. But it was Van Basten’s pass, scoring a hat-trick against England in the organisational phase, that will go down in history as one of the past moments of European football, not to mention the maximum itself.