How England Lost Euro 2020—and How Italy Won

Hint: It wasn't because of penalties

Photo by Michael Regan/UEFA via Getty Images

There are a lot of things we still don’t know about soccer. Mainly: how much does anything matter? Of course, goals are important; goals are the most important. Score goals, stop your opponent from scoring goals, and you’ll win a lot of games. But how much of goal-scoring comes down to one player’s ability to accurately kick a ball or redirect it with his head? How much of it comes down to his ability to occupy the space where he takes his shot from? How much of it comes down to the quality of the guy passing the ball? How many of these goals would never have happened if it weren’t for all the intricate work that happens back in the midfield? You can get lost in the chain of events pretty easily, following it in either direction. Anyone who’s absolutely sure about the answers to any of these questions is wrong, and it’s why you’ll often hear coaches and players speaking about the sport as if it were some kind of metaphysical pursuit rather than a game to be optimized.

Back in December 2019, the Italian coach Massimiliano Allegri put it this way in an interview with James Horncastle for ESPN:

I have to put the other players in a position to get the ball to [my stars], and once they have the ball they decide what to do with it, what the best decision is. My son is 8, and every now and then we go on YouTube and watch the great players, the amazing things they do in attack and in defence, because football is art. In Italy, the tactics, schemes, they're all bullshit. Football is art and the artists are the world-class players. You don't have to teach them anything, you just admire them. All you need to do is put them in the best condition to do well.

Back then, it was strange to hear Allegri speak this way, as he was unemployed and he was essentially making the case that a lot of what coaches say they do doesn’t actually matter. Hire me: I’m useless! It’s also probably not a coincidence that it took another year-and-a-half for Allegri to get a job -- and that he was eventually ust re-hired by the same team, Juventus, that he last worked for -- but he was, albeit indirectly, waving his hands toward one of the things we do know about soccer. Over time, coaches don’t make a huge difference and talent (as determined by a team’s payroll) is the biggest predictor of success.

Yet, despite all that, there are a few clear ways for coaches to shift the odds in their favor. We saw them all on Sunday, as Italy defeated England in penalties at Wembley to win their second-ever European Championship.

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By just about any accounting, England have a significantly more talented national team than Italy. A decade of focus on developing talent -- both at the club and national level -- combined with the Premier League’s explosion into the wealthiest soccer league in the world has produced an incredible collection of young talent that won youth titles at just about every age group is now just beginning to age into the full team. Per the crowd-sourced valuations at the site Transfermarkt, England had seven of the 25 most-valuable players at Euro 2020, while the Italians had none. The England squad was valued at an estimated $1.39 billion, most in the tournament, while Italy came into the tournament with the sixth-most valuable squad ($826.10 million). Those valuations favor younger players -- the more potential prime years you might get from a player, the more he’d be worth in a transfer -- but not enough to make up that kind of gap. Put simply, England arguably had the most talented team at Euro 2020; Italy did not.

When the lineups for the final were announced, Roberto Mancini went with the same exact team from the semifinals, while Gareth Southgate opted to add in an extra defender in Kieran Trippier so England could play with a back five instead of a back four when out of possession. Not in the lineup: Jadon Sancho, the third-most valuable player at the tournament, or Marcus Rashford, the 10th-most valuable. Phil Foden, 11th-most-valuable, was injured for the final but also hadn’t started since the opening match. Bukayo Saka, 27th-most-valuable, and Jack Grealish, 30th-most-valuable, were both on the bench, too.

And yet, it seemed like it was gonna work -- as it had all tournament. In the second minute, a cross from Trippier was smashed in at the far post by Luke Shaw. Southgate had opted for wing backs and a third center back instead of being able to fit in another one of his talented attackers, and well, his freaking wingbacks combined to create a goal in the second minute of the European Championship. The man was briefly a genius.

Except, one of things we do know about soccer is that goals tend to change games -- especially goals that come just two minutes into a game. On average, teams tend to perform worse when they take a lead. They concede more shots, they take fewer shots, and relative to pre-game odds from bookies, they actually win matches less often than you’d expect them to. It’s not too different from the loss aversion you see in other sports or in, well, life in general. One person I know who works with European clubs thinks this is the key advantage yet to be unlocked in the sport -- if a club could convince its coach and players to play in the same aggressive fashion that got them the lead after they take the lead, they’d be unstoppable.

Perhaps due to Southgate’s preferred approach, England were particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. Only five teams at the tournament took fewer shots pergame than they did. Rather than playing all of his highest-valued players, Southgate looked at the history of recent international tournaments and saw that the teams that played the best defense tended to win. It happened with Portugal in 2016, and fans in France were complaining about Didier Deschamps’s conservative decisions right up until the moment they won the World Cup in 2018. Even though they played the joint-most games of any team at the tournament -- and went to extra time in two of them -- England still conceded the fewest goals at the Euros: a measly two.

After scoring with their first shot, England didn’t take another shot in the first half, but it didn’t seem like it was going to matter. Italy dominated possession and out-shot the hosts, 6-1, but they really didn’t come close to scoring. It seemed like England could continue to sit back, and there would be space for them to exploit on the counter attack as Italy pressed higher and higher up the field as their desperation grew.

However, the main way to change the pattern of the game is to change the players. The other thing we knew about this sport is that subs make a huge impact and most coaches don’t sub early or often enough. Players that get subbed just tend to be more productive than players that play from the start, and it’s obvious why: they have a lot more energy. For Southgate, one of the benefits of having such a deep and talented squad is that he didn’t have to do any calculations like, “Well, is my starter at 50-percent energy better than a fully-energized sub?” He just had a lot of great players of roughly equivalent talent, so the decision could’ve been easy: fresh guy better than tired guy. But he rarely decided to make it. Per game, only France and Ukraine made fewer subs than England’s 3.39.

Meanwhile, Mancini was aggressive with his moves all the way until the end. He made 4.63 subs per match -- seventh-most at the Euros -- and on Sunday he made his first two changes before the 55th minute. Most notably, he wasn’t afraid to take off his stars. He subbed off his side’s most valuable player, Nicolo Barella, in the 54th minute, and come 100 minutes of game time, the team’s two best attackers (Lorenzo Insigne and Federico Chiesa), starting striker (Ciro Immobile), and highest-profile midfielder (Marco Verratti) were all off the field.

If you look at the progression of the chances created in the match, per Stats Perform, Italy really started to take control right around the time when Mancini made his initial changes.

Southgate, on the other hand, rode Harry Kane and Raheem Sterling all the way to the very end despite the fact that his attack barely created anything after the opener. They didn’t register another shot on target or attempt another shot from open play after the second minute. That’s brutal. Something had to change in the attacking third, but Southgate was hesitant to change anything. He made two subs during regulation, one more nine minutes into extra time, and then two more with no time left in the match, just to get Sancho and Rashford on the field so they could take penalties.

Of course, Rashford and Sancho both missed, but any criticism of the decisions to allow those two players to take penalties seems outcome-biased to me. If it was a bad decision, then it would’ve been a bad decision even if they both scored, and that’s just not true. The bigger issue is that neither one was on the field earlier, with fresh legs, to give England a chance to first stretch the lead to two goals and then try to win the match before it went to penalties.

Italy, on the other hand, lacked England’s incredible depth but played the final 20 minutes of the match with five new players. Overall, they outshot the hosts, 19 to 6, dominated possession, camped out in England’s final-third, and pressed way more aggressively. Despite playing on the road with a sizable talent disadvantage, they were the better team across 120 minutes, while England seemed to be hanging on for a one-goal win even after their lead had disappeared.

And so, Italy are champions of Euro 2020 after missing the 2018 World Cup completely. Roberto Mancini transformed them into a possession-based team that seemed to do everything they could to push the odds in their favor. Other than the Spain game, there was no more scoreline manipulation, no more sitting back and hoping you could block every shot and control every deflection. For England and Italy, the story of the final and the story of the Euros is the same: One team maxed out their talent, and the other did not. All you have to do, after all, is put your players in the condition to do well.