The match between Germany and Spain in the quarter-finals of Euro 2024 on Friday could easily be the final of the entire competition. Both national teams have so far impressed with their sophisticated and equal brand of possession football. That is no coincidence.
When the two countries met in the Euro 2008 final, Germany and Spain were worlds apart, but 16 years later the two have become philosophical brothers – thanks to Spain’s influence on German football.
The first was seen at the 2010 World Cup when Joachim Löw’s lightly revamped squad featuring the likes of Mesut Özil, Sami Khedira, Thomas Müller and Toni Kroos looked less like the teams of old. Whereas before their main focus was on athleticism and stability, Germany began to play a dominant possession style, until they met Spain in the semi-finals and were pinned in their own half for most of the game, eventually losing 1-0 to the winners. .
To some extent, the German team is similar to Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona team of the same vintage. The Catalan coach’s influence in Germany grew when he took over Bayern Munich in 2013.
Guardiola is not the only Spaniard to leave his mark on the Bundesliga. Just two months before arriving in Munich, Bayern won the Champions League, beating domestic rivals Borussia Dortmund to the continental crown at Wembley. The main difference for “At the end of the day“(“final at home”) in Munich’s Allianz Arena a year earlier, when Bayern failed to beat Chelsea, was Javi MartĂnez. The Basque midfielder provided a unique defensive stability that Bayern had previously lacked. MartĂnez will continue to play. An important role after the 2013 final, although Guardiola often puts him in central defense instead of midfield.
Upon his arrival, Guardiola intends to make some tactical adjustments compared to his predecessor Jupp Heynckes; not as a rejection of Heynckes’ work, but as Guardiola admits that Bayern need a new boost to remain competitive against top-level competition on the European stage. One of the players Guardiola brought to Munich was Thiago Alcantara, who has largely been unable to emerge from the shadow of Andrés Iniesta and Xavi but looks poised to leave his mark at the highest level of European football.
It’s only accidents that often keep Thiago from having a more pronounced impact on Bayern’s game, but when he’s fit, he’s a creative mastermind who directs Bayern’s attacking play. Sadly for Thiago, his crowning achievement came just before he left Munich. In the knockout stages of the 2020 Champions League, which took place largely in a bubble due to the coronavirus pandemic, he led Bayern to yet another European trophy. Towards the end of his tenure, the Italian-born Spain international was almost universally admired by fans and pundits alike.
In the meantime, Germany has won the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, managing to combine fluid positional play with extra protection behind the ball in attack. Furthermore, the national team leans more towards Guardiola’s ideas. However, Germany has not consistently had the player profile to execute that style perfectly.
In his current role at Manchester City, Guardiola has adapted his tactical approach to a certain extent in recent years, with the perennial Premier League champions making more use of low crosses into the box and traditional target players up front. Last season, the manager even showed signs of using more dangerous football, deploying half a dozen defensive players in some games.
However, Germany never found the right balance under Löw. Current coach Julian Nagelsmann has been more successful in that endeavour, although his team appears to have been careless about considering the defensive risks of attacking prowess at the start of the Euros.
More recently, however, another Spaniard has left his fingerprints on the Bundesliga, as Xabi Alonso redefined Bayer Leverkusen’s style and thus dethroned Bayern with patient passing and innovative positional football. It seems that Alonso, who spent two years under Guardiola at Bayern, is following his former leader. He does so with his own concept and style, which also aims to dominate, but is not a carbon copy of the positional play he perfected at Barcelona.
Spain, which has emerged as the strongest team in this year’s Euros, became dominant in possession and did not stop from possession as the previous Spanish team because they not only controlled the ball but also the whole field thanks to a strong midfield core. Rodri, in particular, is the backbone behind Spain’s attacking players, having been a key figure in defensive coverage and counter-pressing.
However, unlike Alonso’s Leverkusen, Spain mainly created scoring opportunities through exceptionally technical and intuitive one-on-one players on both wings: Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal. Germany relies more on attacking midfielders, especially Jamal Musiala, who is a technical marvel in the tight spaces between the opposition lines.
Both countries are very similar in the way they approach the game and the way they want to win. A lot has changed in Germany in the last 16 years.