Who’s excited for Euro 2024? Football at 2pm, 5pm and 8pm daily for the first week or so. Count me in. The Euro’s and the World Cup are the only time I find International football exciting due to the number of televised matches and the trophy at stake. On Friday the competition starts as Germany face Scotland at 8pm UK time. This game will be an interesting opener as many good players will be on show from Jamal Musiala and Florian Wirtz to Andrew Robertson, and even Scott McTominay who is a regular goalscorer for Scotland.
I am going to have a go at predicting the tournament, and we’ll start with Germany and Scotland’s group – Group A. Germany, Scotland, Hungary and Switzerland. Germany will progress from this group as group winners, and any of the others could qualify and I wouldn’t be surprised. I back Switzerland to go through in 2nd due to their defensive minded stars in Manuel Akanji and Granit Xhaka being able to stop teams. Hungary will finish 3rd with Szoboszlai being a huge part in that to scrape them through as a best 3rd placed team, and Scotland crashing out at the group stage – but that might be slightly biased as an England supporter.
Spain, Italy and Croatia will progress from Group B, with one of them surely being a best 3rd placed side. England, Denmark and Serbia should qualify from Group C, Netherlands, France and Austria from D, Belgium and Ukraine from E and Portugal and Czech Republic from F. From there it gets difficult to predict with all the permutations and clashes, however you would expect England, Portugal and France to get far into the tournament.
For the dark horses, I predict the Netherlands. They arguably have the best defence at the tournament with Van Dijk, Dumfries, Ake, De Ligt, Frimpong and Van De Ven among their defensive options, but their attack prevents them from being a proper favourite for me. Depay and Weghorst are not your guaranteed source of goals if you compare them to the Portugal, France or England attacks. It will be interesting to see how the Netherlands perform.
For the underachievers, I will select Spain. It is a tough call as there are not many teams where if they don’t make it far you would say have underachieved. I feel Spain could face the Netherlands in the earlier stages of the knockouts and lose to the Dutch. It’s go big, or go home.
Player of the tournament goes to Harry Kane, and I feel he will also win the Golden Boot. Kane is one of England’s most important players and if he has a big tournament we should get to the latter stages of the competition.
I will assess these predictions at the end of the competition to see how well I have predicted. But it will be exciting to watch the Euro’s and hopefully many of the games will be classics and spoken about for many years to come. And hopefully football does come home.