Follow live coverage of Germany vs Hungary, Croatia vs Albania and Scotland vs Switzerland at Euro 2024 today

Efficiency. Reliability. Functionality.

That’s what many people most associate with Germany, but so far at the 2024 European Championship, none of those cliches have been proven true. Tournament organisers have struggled with crowd control outside stadiums. Fans have endured miserable conditions on the way to and from games. Metro and rail services within the host cities have failed under the extra demand.

It is not what the rest of Europe expected to find.

On Friday night, Euro 2024 began in Munich. The city is used to serving big football crowds, with Bayern Munich selling out their 80,000-capacity Allianz Arena game after game, year after year.

The journey from the centre of town is usually simple enough, via a metro train (on the U-Bahn) that rattles north and delivers fans at Frottmaning station, which is a 10-minute walk from the stadium. For big games, it can get busy. But outside the ground, for Bundesliga and Champions League matches, everything works well enough and supporters find the areas they need.

On Friday night, it could not have been more different. The line that runs out of Munich and up to Frottmaning ground to a halt. Trains stopped at platforms and in tunnels for long periods and grew fuller. Munich has a warm climate, especially in June, and it was to the great credit of the Germany and Scotland supporters that, even though they were jammed up against each other, with no room to move, the mood stayed calm.

Outside the Allianz Arena — in scenes that have been repeated at other games played since — it was chaos. For Bayern games, fans are signposted towards certain entrances, depending on where in the stadium they are sitting. On Friday, the zoning failed, creating one big queue in front of the ground. Some were outside for hours.

On reaching the front of the line, many fans had no choice but to physically push through the crowds to find their entrance, much to the annoyance of others who misinterpreted what was happening, which resulted in a few fleeting flare-ups.

Organisation around Bundesliga games is generally excellent across the country. Many of the supporters in attendance, particularly the German fans, would also have had prior experience of Allianz Arena before and yet this was wildly different.

The first game of a major tournament often brings opening-night wrinkles and issues, but what happened in Munich was strange — and it was just the start.

On Sunday night, England played Serbia in Gelsenkirchen. Bad stories have emerged from before and after the game.

There was gridlock and congestion on the tram service from the station to Arena AufSchalke, the out-of-town stadium, to the extent that some fans chose to walk the entire way instead — about an hour and a half from the city’s central station. England’s 1-0 victory ended up being a sub-plot to stories of crying children, heavy rain and, in a lot of cases, confusion.

Steve Grant, an England fan who follows the team home and abroad, did take public transport to the ground and said overcrowding at the station was so “dangerous” that “if you were stood at the platform edge, you were using your entire body weight to stop yourself being pushed onto the track”. He said there were “no crowd control measures in place at all”.

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After the game, there was more chaos. Another England fan, Alex, described scenes at the main train station as “absolute bedlam” even hours after the final whistle. He had decided to take public transport back, while another friend walked — arriving half an hour before him.

“I couldn’t believe how busy the main station was,” he said. “When we heard the platform announcement for our train, people ran at full pace to reach it — I can’t imagine what it would have been like to take children to the game. Then, when we got to the platform, there was no train. We eventually got back to Dusseldorf (in theory 30 minutes away by intercity train) after 2am.”

Rich Nelson was also in Gelsenkirchen on Sunday night with one of his friends, a wheelchair user.

“It was a right mess,” he said. “Trains were coming to different parts of the platform with no announcement, so you had hundreds of people running to squeeze on. Platforms were altered so Essen trains were coming through when announced as going to Dusseldorf and one train looked like one of the old slam-door British Rail ones.

“We somehow managed to squeeze on thanks to a few people moving and holding doors, but the train took an hour to get to Dusseldorf. The trains have been the poorest and least reliable part of the weekend for us. Not a single train, of the several we took, ran on time and despite us booking ramps (for the wheelchair), Deutsche Bahn staff weren’t interested in helping last night.”

Gelsenkirchen is one of the smallest Euro 2024 host cities. It is an industrial town which has relatively little nightlife or attraction to travelling supporters and fewer hotel rooms than most. It was inevitable that an enormous stress would be placed on its transport systems on the day of the game itself.

Deutsche Bahn (DB) is the company that runs Germany’s privately-operated, government-funded railway network. Once the gold standard of rail travel in Europe, today it is far from that peak and has been for some time.

While people from outside Germany have been aghast at the delays, those who live in the country are all too familiar with DB’s struggles. Trains are late. Trains do not turn up. Trains change destinations without warning. Connections are missed and people are left stranded.

Sit in a DB carriage when a delay is announced and pay attention to the glances that Germans exchange and how they roll their eyes; it has become a punchline and while some of the issues at Euro 2024 are a surprise, the endless delays and disruptions on the train network are not among them.

It is a complicated problem without an obvious remedy.

A train in Euro 2024 colours at Berlin’s Olympiastadion S-Bahn station (Andreas Gora/picture alliance via Getty Images)

The services that DB provides are enshrined within the German constitution. The federal government has a responsibility to maintain a service that serves the common good — referring both to its cost and its reliability.

Recent trends are alarming. In 2020, more than 80 per cent of trains arrived on time. In 2021, it was 75 per cent. By the summer of 2023, the punctuality rate had fallen below 60 per cent, beneath the 70 per cent target DB has publicly committed to.

One of the best-known statistics, certainly the one most repeated in German media, is that in 2022 more than 33 per cent of all long-distance trains arrived late to their destination (defined as at least six minutes late). It represented a 10-year low.

In response to a request for comment for this article, a DB spokesperson said the company was “doing everything we can to get soccer fans to their games on time and stress-free”.

They said the rail system was “at absolute full capacity right now” and DB was “essentially running every train we have”.

Sabrina Wendling of the Pro Rail Alliance, a non-profit interest group for the promotion and improvement of rail transport, says the problems we are seeing are a legacy of underfunding that goes back almost 30 years.

“What we are experiencing now is the heavy burden on a long-neglected railway — with growing traffic at the same time,” she says.

“Past governments have always practised a road-first policy, so that was where the majority of the state’s investments went. That has changed with the present government. But the need for investment is now so high that it will take years to improve the current state of the infrastructure.

“In addition, there is a significant lack of drivers almost everywhere in the country (not only for trains but also for buses and lorries). A lack of drivers often means a dissatisfying frequency of services. This gets very obvious when more people than usual use public transport.”

By DB’s own admission, their infrastructure is in poor condition. In a network status report published in March 2023, they described it as being “prone to failure”, referencing the number of signal boxes, switches and level crossings that were in inadequate condition.

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The size of the network — in terms of track length — has also been shrinking over the past 30 years. At the same time, as Wendling describes, the number of services operating on it has been steadily increasing. The effect is more and more stress on a network that is suffering from a lack of investment. Since 1994, around half the switches on the network have been removed, which makes it harder for trains to pass one another, making it more important that everything runs on time and more impactful when it does not.

There are other inconveniences and antagonisms throughout the network. With over 200,000 members of staff, DB is one of Germany’s largest employers, but there are still shortages of personnel across the network. Station PA systems are a more minor nuisance. While information is almost always provided in German and English, the acoustics can be poor and the announcements can be difficult to hear. During times of stress, or when platform alterations are being read out, that is particularly difficult for people unfamiliar with the network.

A more macro problem is the sheer size of the company. A long-term conversation, which has no end in sight, relates to whether DB should be broken up to make it more manageable but also to introduce more competition to Germany’s rail services.

It’s certainly not difficult to see how a cycle of failure has developed or why it has been so dysfunctional during the current tournament. Ultimately, it is a problem that pre-dates Euro 2024 by decades and will continue for many years. While big investment projects are now underway, including building new lines and adding many more connections between major German cities, the result is a huge burden on the taxpayer and, ironically, more disruption as a result of the projects themselves.

Where does the tournament go from here?

There are still parts of it which are going well. The atmosphere in stadiums is good and the quality of the football itself has been excellent to this point. The Germans are wonderful hosts, too, and from Hamburg in the north to Munich in the far south, the country is full of food, drink, architecture and history that will make the experience of being at this European Championship a rich one.

Many of the volunteers, who are not being paid by UEFA, are clearly doing their best under trying circumstances and working extremely hard to help people. While there have been issues with crowding in the fan zones, too, a lot of thought has evidently gone into providing supporters with entertainment around the games. In Munich on Sunday, as chaos developed in the Ruhr Valley, people enjoyed watching the games on an array of vast screens, next to big lakes in the Olympiapark, with activities and live music to entertain children and families between matches.

But, for now, the bad stories are more prominent. Given how much of an effect they are currently having on the tournament, that might remain the case for some time.

Additional reporting: Dan Sheldon

(Top photo: Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

“I’ve worked with Alexi for 10 years,” says Stu Holden, Fox Sports analyst and former United States men’s national team midfielder. “He’s one of the first people that I am asked about. They say: ‘What’s that guy like off-camera?’.”

It is a thought many may share while watching Alexi Lalas, the formerly goatee-bearded U.S. central defender who rose to prominence at the 1994 World Cup, now best known for his tinderbox contributions on American soccer television.

He comes with a significant soccer pedigree, recording almost a century of caps for his country and playing in Italy’s Serie A and Major League Soccer. A signpost of his influencer status came in 2021 when the world governing body, FIFA, undertook a feasibility study as part of a failed attempt to introduce a biennial World Cup. Lalas was invited along to a seminar hosted by former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger as part of a cohort that included Brazilians Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos, former Denmark and Manchester United goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel and Australia’s Tim Cahill.

On U.S. television, Lalas, 54, a studio analyst for Fox during the European Championship and Copa America this summer, is bold and direct in his opinions. This week, he has already compared the England national team to the Dallas Cowboys, saying the English are as “insufferable as they are talented”.

And over 40 minutes in a Manhattan coffee shop, he is no different. Topics cut across the future of Gregg Berhalter as coach of the U.S. men’s national team (“We’re letting the players off the hook”, he insists), or his “video game” approach to social media. This is a dose of pure, undiluted Lalas. Sitting beside him, ordering a piccolo coffee (“Don’t encourage him,” Lalas says, when I ask what a piccolo involves), is the more reserved Holden, 38, who also packs a punch in his analysis.

I tell Lalas that some people took a deep breath when I mentioned I was due to interview him. He smiles. First and foremost, Lalas says he sees his studio role as “hopefully having an interesting and informative take, and doing it in an entertaining way”.

He stirs. “But I’m in the entertainment business. I am a performer. When you say that, sometimes people cringe. By no means am I saying that I can’t be authentic and genuine. But I recognise the way I say something is as important as what I say.

“When I go on TV, I put on a costume and when that red light goes on, I don’t want people changing the channel. I don’t care if you like me or you don’t. I am as human as I possibly can be with the recognition that, on television, things have to be bigger and bolder.”

Holden interjects: “He’s one of my good friends. People ask me: ‘Does he believe everything he says?’. And I say, ‘We have the same conversations at the bar that we have on air’.

“I’ve learned from Alexi that you have to be interesting in this business to have longevity. Whether that’s the role that he plays, still authentic to who he is and the opinions he carries — but maybe a little bit of juice on there to fire it up — you never want to be in between. You never want to be in the middle of it, where people are just like, ‘Ah, that guy’s fine’. So be on one side, be bold, don’t care about opinions, but be authentic to who you are. And that’s who he is — on and off camera.”

Holden made 25 appearances for the USMNT but a career that included Premier League spells at Sunderland and Bolton Wanderers was cruelly cut short by injury. He and Lalas apply diligence to their output, often meeting with coaches, players or front-office staff the day before the match to explain to viewers what the team is seeking to achieve.

As time passes, they are more distant from a modern locker room but Holden says it’s important “to take people inside the tent”.

“It’s not as common in England,” he adds, “but it is ingrained in American sports television where they will go to NFL practice, sit with the coaches, get exclusive breakdowns of play. Europeans have a hard time understanding this when they come here. Patrick Vieira (when he was manager of New York City FC) didn’t want to meet with us. Frank de Boer (at Atlanta United), too. Often the European or South American coaches are like, ‘Why are you guys in here?’.”

They believe that being that little bit detached, in terms of age, allows them to come down harder, when appropriate, on those they analyse. I suggest that many within the sports industry police themselves carefully when on television or radio these days, cautious about a public backlash.

“Life’s too short and f*** them,” Lalas says, bluntly.

“Ultimately, I’m talking about soccer. I know we get incredibly passionate and emotional about these things — something I love about sports. I try to be honest and sometimes it comes off in different ways and people perceive it differently. It’s one thing over a keyboard but it’s a very different type of interaction in normal life. There are people that come up to me who disagree with me but we have a cordial, civil and respectful conversation, even if we vehemently disagree about things on and off the soccer field.”

His on-screen character, he says, takes inspiration beyond sports broadcasting. “It is an element of a shock jock, an element of political commentary, an element of late-night television host. And then when it came to actual sports, I grew up in the ESPN age where the hot take was happening, but then I also like Gary Lineker (the former England international striker and long-time presenter of the BBC’s football coverage in the UK).

“The way he talks about things, you almost forget that he was a player — and not just a player, but a f***ing great player. When I hear him talk about the game and life, even if I agree or disagree with the way he does it, it makes me forget that he was once this great player because it’s interesting, informative and entertaining in the way he does it. And so I have a lot of respect for what he’s carved out.”

Lineker and Lalas share another thing in common, in that both men appear to be in a love-hate relationship with social media. Lineker’s show Match of the Day, the BBC’s Premier League highlights programme, was plunged into crisis last year after the corporation took a dim view of his political commentary on Twitter, now known as X.

If Lineker is on the centre-left, Lalas appears to be a political antidote, recently announcing on Twitter that he will be attending the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Like Lineker, he seems unable to resist being sucked into the vortex of culture war politics. He shared posts recently that appear sympathetic to Donald Trump and is in regular playful combat with his social media detractors. Yet he has already said that he places so much more value on in-person interactions. So why bother with X?

“I’m sure there’s an element of addiction that I will cop to,” he acknowledges. “It’s just the world in which we live. There is an element of ego. But I’m also under no delusions that I’m not solving the world’s problems. Nobody gives a s*** what the hell I have to say about most of this stuff. First off, Twitter is an information machine.”

But it can also be a misinformation machine.

“At times,” he laughs. “It depends on who you ask or where you look. I look at it almost as a video game that I play.

“There’s an element of poking the bear and being provocative that I enjoy. When it comes to things off the field, like politics, there is a cathartic release to being honest, especially in this day and age. There was a time we were all so bold. And now we live at times, unfortunately, in fear of the real backlash that can come from just saying something people disagree with. Whether it’s politics or sports, I don’t want to live in a world like that. Maybe this is just the way I retaliate.

“I’m not saying that it’s smart or prudent, especially if it can be alienating to people. When it comes to separating the sports and the personal, sometimes they blur and sometimes they infect or affect the other side. But I will only live once and I’d rather just be as honest as I possibly can, regardless of whether anybody listens or cares.”

During this summer’s Copa America, with the USMNT looking for signs of substantial progress under Berhalter, Lalas will be as direct as ever. Holden, too, makes clear the expectations.

How to follow Euro 2024 and Copa America on The Athletic…

“Passing the group stage is not negotiable,” Holden insists. “If we don’t get out of a group containing Panama and Bolivia, then what are we doing? That becomes the time to make a change.”

Lalas cuts in: “Is it untenable? Maybe from the outside and how we look at it. But ultimately it’s (U.S. Soccer’s technical director) Matt Crocker who will make that decision. And he had the opportunity (Berhalter was reappointed as USMNT coach in June 2023).

“Nobody would have begrudged cleaning house and getting rid of everybody. And yet he (Crocker) didn’t. So something really bad has to happen for U.S. Soccer to make a change.

“But there are a lot of people sitting with their arms folded saying, ‘All right, Gregg, you got a long leash, you got a second opportunity, we need to see something different, we need to see something that makes us believe that come the World Cup 2026, there’s the possibility for the first time ever, that a U.S. men’s national team could win a World Cup.’ And we haven’t had those moments. He needs a statement type of game and statement type of summer to mollify some of that.”

Holden points out the USMNT, who exited the last World Cup in the round of 16 against the Netherlands, had the second-youngest team in Qatar and cites the draw against England, where he says the USMNT went “toe-to-toe”, as evidence of what might be possible.

Lalas says: “We’re letting the players off the hook a bit when we constantly talk about the coach. They have been given every benefit, every resource. Nothing has been spared from an early age. It is fair for us to expect more out of them individually and collectively. They’re no longer teenagers. Some of them play for the best teams and in the best leagues in the world. It’s time to put up or shut up.

“We put a lot of emphasis on coaching — and I’m not saying they can’t have an effect — but this is a players’ game. When that whistle blows, you get to decide what happens and the onus is on you. And if you want it, that’s great. If you don’t, then don’t blame the coach.”

Holden grins: “If the U.S. wins the Copa America, it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever done as a soccer nation on the men’s side — hands down.”

(Top image: Amy Sussman/Getty Images)

Follow our Olympics coverage in the lead-up to the Paris Games.

PARIS — It’s been quite the spring in Paris, with the city set to host the Olympic Games for the first time in 100 years.

Temporary stadiums are rising at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, in the plaza next to the Orangerie (home of the Monet murals), in the gardens of Versailles. Most people though will never see what may be the most important Olympic facility, the $1.5 billion underground tunnel and water tank that is supposed to make the Seine, the river that flows through the heart of the city, suitable for the triathlon and the marathon swim races and beyond.

Yes, you read that right — swimming in the Seine. The river that makes hearts melt, the site of countless marriage proposals, where for years, couples would “lock their love” by writing their names on a padlock, attaching it to the Pont des Arts and tossing the key into the water. It is also the river that only those who crave a baptism by murk, sewage, fecal refuse and various other detritus would think of heading for a dip, which has been illegal for roughly a century.

The organizers of the Paris Games tried this out with some test events last year, including a triathlon. Kirsten Kasper, a longtime triathlete who will make her Olympic debut in Paris, was there. She remembers standing on the starting dock, “looking up at the Eiffel Tower, and just smiling.”

The “looking up” part probably had something to do with that.

As for the smile, that jibes with what Lambis Konstantinidis, the director of planning and coordination for the Paris Games, heard when he asked athletes about their time in the river.

“There was not one that did not say it was not a unique experience,” he said.

That is one way to describe it.

Whether any of the Olympians and Paralympians preparing to compete in the Seine get the chance to swim in the river remains an open question. It turns out that a $1.5 billion water tank intended to catch sewage during rainstorms that would normally flow into the river — plus years of forcing houseboats, ships and factories to stop polluting the river — can only do so much.

Officials inaugurated the Austerlitz water basin, which is located underneath the Austerlitz train station on the river’s Left Bank in the southeast quadrant of the city, in early May. It can hold 13.2 million gallons of water — enough to fill 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

In late May, rain fell on Paris for a week. That wreaked havoc with play at the French Open and rendered the Seine unswimmable because the rain overwhelmed the tank and tunnel system, and street runoff and fecal matter flowed into the river once more.

Officials knew this could happen. They know it might happen during the Olympic Games, though late July and early August, when the Games will take place, are generally warm and dry in the French capital. They hope weather patterns hold.

World Aquatics, the world governing body for swimming, recommends that organizers of open water events consider alternative locations to manage a drop in water quality on race day. Paris officials considered their options, but ultimately decided to hope it doesn’t rain, and that the warm sun of a typical Paris summer can kill enough of the dangerous bacteria.

There is no Plan B, other than postponing races for a few days to let the yucky water flow downstream. They say they could also turn the triathlon into a duathlon, comprised only of cycling and running, but there’s no pristine lake on the city’s outskirts on standby for the 6.2-mile swim race.

“Nothing will be done to put the athletes at risk,” Konstantinidis said.

Paris organizers are counting on a newly constructed water basin beneath the Austerlitz train station to keep the Seine clean during the Olympics and beyond. (Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images)

Whether the water will be clean enough for competition has become a quadrennial conversation for Olympic organizers who have increasingly leaned toward locating these events in scenic waters that look great on television. Racing in open water isn’t all swimming off the coast of Kona, Hawaii, at the Ironman World Championships. But the tradeoff for beautiful sights on television and competitions in the heart of the cities that host them is often water that is kind of gross.

In 2016, Rio wanted to put the swimmers off the beaches of Copacabana, which for years have been the receptacles for the city’s sewage. Five years later, Tokyo had the swimmers compete in Odaiba Marine Park in the city’s busy harbor, which also harbors plenty of the city’s sewage and runoff. Officials installed a series of screens that were supposed to catch some of the harmful bacteria from the excess flow.

Morgan Pearson, a favorite to medal in triathlon for the U.S., said the water in Tokyo was “much murkier” than what he experienced at the test event last year in Paris. He skipped a practice swim in the river because he figured getting more familiar with the current wasn’t worth the risk of possibly getting sick.

“I’ve been in cleaner water in my life,” Pearson said of the Seine, “but there wasn’t anything that stuck out.”

Indeed, bacteria rarely does.

Like all organizers of major open water competitions, the people in charge of the Paris Games will comply with the World Aquatics standards for safe swimming set by the World Health Organization for the levels of bacteria most closely associated with sewage contamination — E. coli and enterococci.

The open-water venue will certainly pop on TV, but health concerns for athletes swimming in the Seine will persist through the Olympic races. (Bertrand Guay / AFP via Getty Images)

That requires a classification of “good water quality” which, for those microbiology majors out there, means less than 500 “colony-forming units” of E. coli per 100 milliliters of water and less than 200 units of enterococci. A colony-forming unit is a collection of cells. The Seine will also have to pass an eye test for murkiness and floating debris. The tests are supposed to take place several days ahead of the competitions and at multiple locations along the course.

Taylor Spivey, another member of the American triathlon team, grew up lifeguarding on the beaches of southern California near Los Angeles. She knew from an early age that swimming after a rainstorm was a bad idea. She has not forgotten it. She swam in the Seine last year during the test event.

“No one got sick,” she said with a smile.

The prayer of all Olympic organizers is that the Games leave a legacy and change their cities. For the French, making sure the competitors in the Olympics and Paralympics are not the last ones to swim in the Seine is a major part of that.

There are canals in the city that already allow limited swimming. The city plans to open three swimming areas along the river in 2025, assuming the Austerlitz water basin can do its job and the city’s residents are ready to take this very specific leap of faith.

“Parisians are getting used to the idea” of swimming in the urban waterways Konstantinidis said, “but they will need to see it.”

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(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images)