It was the economic and political interests, as always happens in football, those who promoted the now repudiated Michel Platini and his courtiers to design almost a decade ago the Euro-Vista, but the story built around him varnished that idea with a patina of Romanticism that led to the football community to perform an exercise of Sosselation on its real motivations to give it for good. Europe United about a ball, thousands of amateurs touring the continent chasing a national dream with final station in Wembley, emotional football epicenter by the history inherited from its original already demolished version. The script was perfect, at the expense of his protagonists, the players, honored him on the lawn. They have fulfilled their part, drawing a large eurocap, perhaps one of the best as usual, that tonight will coroned Italy or England, two allegories of the prevalence of the collective on individualities – as Spain, as Denmark – precisely the idea of Europe that this tournament intended to represent. Around the ball, however, everything has been destroyed. Populism threatens the draft unit of the continent as I had never done it since the Second World War and the final is played in a country that broke moorings with its closest neighbors to fly again. Those powerful Europe is today a fragile Europe, worn economically and emotionally by a pandemic that has dynamited consensus and altered social habits. The imagined great torrent of amateur filling airports and cities has not existed because of international restrictions, transforming praises into complaints. Nothing that was not foreseen for more than a year, despite what UEFA decided to go ahead with a tournament format that now has a failed. There were too many economic commitments already charged to resign. The money, precisely, justifies that Wembley is going to be today, as happened in the semifinals, a prepandemic oasis. Despite the alarming increase in cases in the United Kingdom – the rate of contagions at 14 days per 100,000 inhabitants exceeds 500 cases – the London stadium will return to 60,000 spectators in the final, 70% of their total capacity. The mask is already a vestige of the past and the social distance a chimera, both within the stadium and in public transport and the rest of the British society, in a climate of national euphoria encouraged by the Government of Boris Johnson, which is It has eliminating all pandemic standard within a week. Football was always a symptom of how a society beats. Wembley, like Paris, well worth a mass. Restrictions on foreign travelers will also cause the final to be an enclosure for Roberto Mancini’s enthusiast Italy, who curiously exercises local. All the pressure, then, is for England, with everything in favor to break with its historic marriage with failure, whose only exception was the 1966 World Cup, resolved in Old Wembley. The defeat of the Gareth Southgate selection, after playing in London six of his seven games, would be a drama for a country that does not support more sport than themselves invented more than a and a half century ago. No doubt the Three Lions with the favorites Vitola, but in this Eurocopa, it is already known, nothing tends to come out as planned.

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