For a man who captained his club to a treble and his nation to a World Cup, Philipp Lahm has given a good impression of someone leading his best life over the past week or so.
The former Bayern Munich and Germany full-back has been smashing his socials at Euro 2024.
There he is backstage with Ed Sheeran on the eve of the tournament in Munich, two days later he is in Berlin with Luis Figo for Spain versus Croatia, before running into the Portuguese great again, but this time with Christian Karembeu and Xabi Alonso in Dusseldorf for Austria-France, before catching Germany’s win over Hungary in Stuttgart on Wednesday.
Morgen ist es endlich soweit: „O’pfiff is“! Gestern durften wir #CeliaSasic und 60.000 begeisterten Fans gemeinsam das EURO Fanfest auf der Theresienwiese feiern und genießen. Die Stimmung war großartig, denn Musik und Fußball verbinden die Menschen wie nichts anderes. pic.twitter.com/L9OvVl4IlB
— Philipp Lahm (@philipplahm) June 13, 2024
The 40-year-old is having such a good time he can joke on X about his train to Dusseldorf for Slovakia-Ukraine running so late he missed an interview with German TV. It all worked out, though, as fellow German FA (DFB) director Celia Sasic stepped in, and they even got a selfie with Ukraine legend Andriy Shevchenko after the match.
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“P.S. Dear (German railway operator) Deutsche Bahn, we have to be in Frankfurt on time for Germany on Sunday — we are confident we can manage it together,” he added, with a wink emoji.
And just to show that everyone is in on the joke, Deutsche Bahn’s press office replied: “We’ll do our best to make sure everything goes smoothly… hopefully, this tweet doesn’t age badly.”
It is an exchange that sums up Euro 2024. Yes, there have been transport issues but everyone has got to where they needed to be eventually, the football has been fun and the fans appear to be having a ball.
It has, in other words, been a vindication of the promise Lahm made six years ago, when the retired defender became the frontman for Germany’s Euro 2024 bid.
It was a two-horse race with Turkey but, given Germany’s track record for staging events, strong economy and catalogue of finished stadiums, it was not much of a contest even before Lahm played his nation’s trump card: fan culture.
“We look forward to welcoming fans from across Europe and the world to celebrate a great football party together,” said Lahm, now the DFB’s Euro 2024 tournament director.
And everyone knew what he meant. After all, Germany had staged a World Cup ‘sommermarchen’, summer fairytale, in 2006 and the thousands of foreign fans who travel to Bundesliga games every weekend can vouch for the joys of cheap tickets, authentic passion and beer on terraces.
But few in 2018 could have appreciated just how appealing this would become in 2024, as it was before Covid-19 first postponed and then compromised the next European Championship.
Bookending that watered-down affair, we had two World Cups that were successful in many regards but… different.
Russia could have been a party, too, but its size, deteriorating relationship with the rest of Europe and reputation for aggressive policing put off many potential attendees.
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Qatar defied low Western expectations to put on a good show. Everything worked and many who went enjoyed it. But the fun often felt forced, the spontaneity choreographed and it was hard to dispel concerns for those who did all the hard work in getting the place ready.
Full disclosure, I wanted what Lahm was selling. I came to the 2006 World Cup as a fan and loved it. So I came here this month to see if Germany was still what I remembered: the most fan-friendly place to stage an international football tournament.
This piece is a follow-up to one I wrote in Qatar. There, I tried to see four matches in one day to stress-test Qatar’s claim that its “compact” size meant you could watch more than one a day. The piece was as gimmicky as the USP but I managed it, which means Qatar did, too.
You would need a private jet and police outriders to catch more than one a day here but Germany is just small enough — and its transport network just good enough — to see four games in four cities in four days.
Lahm was right. Germany is throwing one hell of a football party.
Wednesday: Germany 2-0 Hungary, Stuttgart
Let us start with first impressions. Stuttgart’s central station is a building site. The pictures of the end result look amazing but now? Not so good.
Second impressions? Yeah, Stuttgart is what I expected. The home of Bosch, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, this is a wealthy place that scores highly on all the liveability metrics.
Like most of the big stadiums in Germany, the Stuttgart Arena (no non-UEFA sponsors’ names allowed at this tournament) is about an hour’s walk from the city centre but the sun was shining, so I give it a go.
Unlike most cities in Germany, Stuttgart is spread over a few hefty hills. Arriving at the ground more than a little sweaty, I resolved to get the U-Bahn metro back after the match.
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Again, like most of the host stadiums, this one has been here for about a century but has been through several facelifts, most significantly in the build-up to the 2006 World Cup. Track and field fans will only recognise the white fabric roof from the venue that hosted the 1993 World Athletics Championships. This is a football ground now.
If you want a report on the match, here is one we prepared earlier. I will only add that Germany looked annoyingly good and that is potentially significant for how this tournament will be remembered.
Germany’s economy and its football team had a lot in common coming into this year. Once mighty, both were going through ‘meh’ phases. What better way, then, to fix both than by staging the Euros?
The competitive advantage of playing at home in a tournament, in any sport, is well established but the economic benefits of staging major events are disputed. Put it this way — every host always says Event X is going to add Percentage Y to the local and/or national economy.
It was hoped that the Euros would earn Germany an extra €1billion (£850m, $1.07bn) in tourism income, boosting the country’s gross domestic product by 0.1 per cent, which does not sound much for a €4trillion-a-year operation but would be a big deal for the businesses most affected: bars, hotels and kebab shops.
As the German Economic Institute’s Michael Groemling noted before the tournament, “major sporting events are not economic fireworks”. Yes, Germans might buy a new TV or have another beer but they will spend a little less on something else. It is not extra spending, it is shifted spending.
What might help, though, is Germany living up to “Berlin, Berlin, wir fahren nach Berlin”, as everyone on the metro was chanting. And Julian Nagelsmann and co have certainly got them believing a place in the final on July 14 is possible.
My final impression, as I crowded onto the one train back to Frankfurt that had not vanished from the departures board, was that the end of the 70-year relationship between Adidas and the DFB, announced to a stunned nation before the tournament, is going to put a dent in the German firm’s domestic sales. Practically every German fan wears something made by Adidas. Will they buy Nike’s official merch from 2027 onwards?
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Maybe, but I note that Adidas’ share price is up almost 20 per cent since the start of the year, while Nike’s is down 10 per cent. Perhaps the markets think Nike has overestimated the value of the shirt and Adidas is better off spending its money elsewhere.
Hmmm, might be a wider lesson there.
Thursday: Denmark 1-1 England, Frankfurt
No sugar-coating this one: every England fan I spoke to who had been to Gelsenkirchen for the opening game against Serbia said they would not be rushing back.
Picked over the likes of Bremen and Hannover as one of Germany’s 10 Euro 2024 hosts, there was clearly a bit of trying to bring some big-event love to a city that has struggled since the decline of the local coal industry.
But what Gelsenkirchen does have is a big stadium, Schalke’s ground, a 62,000-capacity venue that hosted games in 2006 and has been a regular stop on the Champions League circuit.
The city is one of four in what the organisers had hoped would form a “cluster” in the heart of western Germany, with Cologne, Dortmund and Dusseldorf being the others. The idea was fans could stay in any of these cities, or somewhere like Bochum or Essen, and move between them easily.
Nice theory — but it fell at the first fence.
When Schalke play at home, everyone knows where they are going and many drive. England’s large away following, on the other hand, had no clue where it was going, came by public transport and wanted to get out after the game, which finished at close to 11pm local time.
When you throw into the mix the fact this was one of the few games that police and circled, highlighted and underlined as one where there might be trouble (and there was but it was isolated and resulted in a handful of arrests for Serbia and England fans), surely everyone can see the potential for disappointment here.
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Everyone but the organisers, apparently.
Oh well. Frankfurt, Germany’s financial centre, with a huge station, a load of hotels and streets of bars, was a very different experience.
Both sets of fans mingled peacefully, albeit unsteadily, all day. With the battles between Alfred the Great and Guthrum’s “great heathen army” now distant memories, there is no needle between Denmark and England, so they were given full-strength Bitburger Pils to drink at the stadium.
Formerly known as the Waldstadion, or Forest Stadium, the Frankfurt Arena is hidden by trees until you are almost in it, which is some trick, as it is a massive, concrete bowl, with a retractable roof.
For reasons that were never made entirely clear, the roof was closed for the game, which certainly helped the fans sweat out a few of their beers.
But getting in and out of the ground was easy, as you would expect of a venue that hosted Beyonce, Harry Styles and two NFL games last season.
The match-going experience for England fans was night and day compared to the first game.
“We always knew Germany was a natural home for a tournament, a great place for fan culture, beer and football,” says Thomas Concannon from the Free Lions “fans embassy” run by the Football Supporters’ Association.
“Fans have had a great welcome across Germany and not just in the host cities. Seeing fans of every nation mixing together, singing in the squares and watching the games in bars is what a tournament should be about. Everyone feels part of it, all are welcome.
“Even the German police, keeping an eye from a distance, seem to be enjoying the atmosphere. Sensible policing is a key part of creating positive behaviour and so far the Germans are delivering.”
The game, by the way, was dreadful. Utterly miserable. And yet still we come.
Friday: Netherlands 0-0 France, Leipzig
The 400-kilometre train ride from Frankfurt to Leipzig, in eastern Germany, gave me plenty of time to think about how the Germans were tackling this tournament in terms of maintaining order and moving us about it.
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Much has been said about the latter but how Germany is policing Euro 2024 has been an eye-opener to someone from a country where most crowd-control experts now believe the “softly softly” approach is more effective than rocking up in big numbers, wearing riot gear.
It is a school of thought that does not seem to have taken hold in German police academies, as their graduates are a very visible presence, fully tooled-up, at the tournament.
But that is not to say they are being in-your-face. They are just there. And once you realise that, it is quite reassuring.
God knows how much it is costing — German media reported before the tournament that all the host cities were spending more on security than they first budgeted — but you can hardly blame them for thinking better safe than sorry.
“I’d even go back to 2012,” says Football Supporters Europe boss Ronan Evain when I asked if this feels like the first really fan-friendly tournament for a while.
“The French police (at Euro 2016) were nowhere near as welcoming as the Germans have been and while the trains haven’t run on time, they do run late into the night and they’re relatively cheap.
“That means people have been able to stay in more places around the country, not just the host cities. That has spread the benefits of hosting the tournament around Germany but it’s also meant fans have seen more of the country.
“In 2016, the last trains out of Marseille were before 10pm, so you were stuck, you had to stay there. I was on a train from Dortmund to Leipzig yesterday and hundreds of Dutch fans got on at Halle, about half an hour from Leipzig, but they had used it as their base.”
He is right. My train picked up Dutch and French fans as we moved east.
Leipzig is a wonderful place, by the way. A centre of culture and learning, it was also one of East Germany’s industrial hubs before the Berlin Wall came down.
While most in Leipzig celebrated that, reunification hit the economy hard. East Germany’s state-backed factories immediately became uneconomic and Leipzig’s population plummeted.
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But the city has bounced back to such an extent it has been dubbed “Hypezig”, and is now the type of place where you see people with edgy haircuts zipping about on scooters and skateboards. There are also lots of nice buildings, cool cafes and there is a ska festival later this summer.
It is perhaps ironic, then, that it is home to RB Leipzig, the most divisive club in German football due to their controversial creation story.
That is not really our story here but there was nothing artificial about the atmosphere at their stadium for this game.
The Dutch, as they always do, provided the colour — you can wear anything you like, as long as it is orange — while the smaller contingent of French fans brought the noise.
If truth be told, the Dutch appeared to put all their energy into their fans’ walk from the city centre. They brought flags, pyro, giant inflatable footballs, papier-mache busts of former heroes and two open-topped double-decker buses, with sound systems.
But once in the stadium, they sat down and waited for their heroes to entertain them, while the French drummed, sang and bounced around throughout.
Not bad for a nation that is sometimes accused of being too cool to get overly excited about football. Perhaps Germany is bringing out their inner ultra?
“The tournament doesn’t feel disconnected from German fan culture,” says Evain, a card-carrying Frenchman.
“The stadiums haven’t been modified and there has been no effort to cover up the graffiti, which has happened elsewhere. It feels authentic.
“Nobody is questioning why they are here. Of course, nobody has to go to tournaments but being a fan isn’t rational, you just have to go. But nobody is worrying about how these stadiums were built or how welcome some might be. I don’t think anyone regrets travelling here.
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“But I also think there is something special about this tournament being in only one country. The Euros should be about fans from 24 countries coming together to celebrate their diversity. That is the essence of these tournaments but it gets diluted when it’s shared across two, three, six countries.”
The game started as if the two sides were playing a different — much better — sport than the one played in Frankfurt 24 hours before. But it fizzled out and ended goalless, the first 0-0 of the tournament. We did have a Premier League production VAR controversy, though.
Saturday: Belgium 2-0 Romania, Cologne
That last point really hit home on the last leg of my four-game trip.
This is probably the first tournament where all 51 games will be attended by at least 10,000 or so fans from each of the participants.
That is not to say that many have travelled here but, with 84million inhabitants, Germany is home to sizeable immigrant populations from across Europe and beyond. In recent years, it has been second only to the United States as a host for immigrants.
It is for this reason that Euro 2024 has seen, and heard, such remarkable numbers of fans supporting Albania, Croatia, Czech Republic, Georgia, Serbia, Slovakia and, of course, Turkey, Germany’s “second team”.
And it is why I could arrive in Cologne and just follow, half-asleep, an army of yellow-clad Romania fans to the stadium.
There were lots of Belgians there, too, but you would expect to see them there — my train from Frankfurt was heading to Brussels. Instead, the large numbers of fans from countries that do not usually take big away followings with them have made this tournament for me.
In terms of the football, I saved the best until last. This game was a cracker and the atmosphere was belting.
And not just in Cologne’s compact stadium. As I wandered back to the main train station after midnight, the city centre was teeming with life. Fans from every corner of the continent were there, all jumbled up with the good folk of Cologne going about their regular Saturday night business.
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The police were still watching but they were benign observers, just letting it all unfold.
Gut gemacht, Germany, you have not disappointed.
Lahm, by the way, has just posted a selfie from the train to Germany’s game against Switzerland in Frankfurt.
“Deutsche Bahn, as you can see, I remain a loyal train customer.”
As British Rail used to say, even DB is getting there.
(Top photo: Belgium fans before their win over Romania in Cologne. Peter De Voecht / Photo News via Getty Images)
