Who Is the Best Player at Euro 2020?
Raheem Sterling? Leonardo Bonucci? Sergio Busquets? Joakim Maehle? Five games in, the answer isn't clear.
Over at the Copa America -- in front of no fans, after everyone in Europe’s asleep -- Lionel Messi is doing what Lionel Messi does: everything. Through five games, Messi has scored four goals and assisted four more. No one else has more than two of either one. He’s leading all players in shots, progressive passes, shot-creating actions, and progressive carries.1 This would be surprising ... if he hadn’t been doing the exact same thing, year in and year out, for over a decade now.
The Copa is especially designed for chaos. Beyond the lack of “midfield passing” and “respect for the bodily health and professional livelihoods of your fellow competitors” that’s been on display in Brazil, tied matches immediately go to penalties after 90 minutes of play. Half the quarterfinals got there, and one of the semis probably will, too. Any of the remaining teams could win it -- Argentina plays Colombia, Brazil plays Peru -- but it’s unquestionably been Messi’s tournament, no matter what happens from here.
What about the Euros, though? Who owns it? Anyone? The structure of these events just calls out for an individual to take control. The game is slower, so there’s more time and space for standout performances to emerge up and down the field. And the knockout rounds will make up at least half -- if not more -- of the tournament for all of the remaining teams. In these games, individual moments, rather than system-based excellence, tend to keep teams alive.
At the last World Cup, Luka Modric won the Golden Ball and then the Ballon d’Or, which seemed more like a career-achievement award than a true assessment of who the best player was. Perhaps Real Madrid and (some) Croatia fans will remember the 2018 World Cup as Modric’s tournament -- when he led the Croats to one non-shootout victory and zero regulation wins in the knockout stages -- but for most people it was Kylian Mbappe’s event. Plenty of fans already knew how good he was, but this was the moment when he announced himself to your mom, dad, Doug Gottlieb, and maybe even your second-cousin. (My sincerest apologies if Doug Gottleb is either your dad or your second-cousin.) At Euro 2016, Antoine Griezmann won Player of the Tournament, while Cristiano Ronalo and Gareth Bale, in particular, stood out as they carried their teams in a way neither one really had to at the club level since they both played for the same team. In 2014, Messi and James Rodriguez stole the show.
But this year, we’re still waiting. Over the first four games, Paul Pogba dominated proceedings in a way that maybe no other midfielder would have ever been able to do. His blend of size, strength, vision, and precise technical skill is unheard of at his position -- and he was on the verge of taking the tournament over after he harnessed the power of the Earth’s rotation to put France up 3-1 on the Swiss. Then, France blew the lead, performed their mandatory decennial ritual of “remembering we actually all hate each other”, and that was that.
Ronaldo is probably going to win the Golden Boot, but three of his five goals came from penalties. Despite every TV broadcast’s best efforts at mythmaking for a powerful man credibly accused of sexual assault, no serious person thinks he was anywhere near the best player at this event.
We still have three games left, of course. The three most important games for this kind of unscientific, arbitrary, group-think to take hold. Per the Draft Kings sportsbook, Raheem Sterling is the favorite (+175) to win Player of the Tournament. And within the context of England, he’s been brilliant. He’s scored or assisted on half of the team’s eight goals. He notched the winners against Croatia, Czech Republic, and Germany -- and then he set up the winner against Ukraine. Before Garetj Southgate opened things up in the quarters, Sterling’s ability to push the ball up field with his feet and find space in the penalty area is what allowed England to get away with such a cautious approach over the first four games of the tournament. If England win it all -- they’re the favorites to do so -- and Sterling gets another important goal, he’ll likely win the award. We’d love to see it, too. His play has long been underappreciated because he doesn’t always kick the ball into the goal, and he’s been constantly ridiculed by the dog-whistling corners of the British press. I’d love to see how the Daily Mail would spin him lifting the trophy, “Young footballer, 26, on £300,000 a week, flaunts obscene silver vase as global warming destroys plant population and children across UK cannot afford fresh vegetables”.
For as satisfying as that would be, Sterling’s Euros still don’t feel like one of consistent dominance. Has he been the best player at the tournament? Given what he’s produced despite England’s overall reluctance to ever attack, maybe -- but probably not. He’s been the most important player for the team most likely to win it all. He’s knitted together just enough of those decisive moments to make him the favorite for the award, but the field is still favored ahead of him.
Except, who else should get it? Some more goals from Harry Kane might get him there, but you’d have to completely ignore the group stages -- and the fact that there were actual people on planet earth, some of whom I greatly respect, calling for him to be benched in favor of Everton’s Dominic Calvert-Lewin -- to make that case. He could easily win the award, but I have a hard time seeing how this could go down as Harry Kane’s tournament in our collective memory. And when you look at the other teams, there’s no obvious alternative. These are the top 20 favorites for Player of the Tournament, per Draft Kings:
With Simon Kjaer and Leonardo Bonucci, both seem like a case of just picking the leader of a team without a clear attacking star. They’ve both been very good -- and Kjaer might’ve actually saved Christian Eriksen’s life -- but I’m not sure there’s a realistic case to be made that either one has been anywhere near the best player at the tournament. Neither guy has won a single Man of the Match award yet -- an incredibly-flawed-but-not-useless proxy for perceived performance. Four players have won two: Italy’s Leonardo Spinnazola, who tore his Achilles against Belgium, Denzel Dumfries of the Netherlands and Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku, who are both on teams that have already been eliminated, and Spain’s Sergio Busquets.
By the odds, the 32-year-old Busi is Spain’s favorite for POTY, and he’s racked up two MOTM awards despite missing the first match of the tournament. I’ve been surprised with how well he’s played. He’s a lot more involved in intricate final-third passing than he is at Barca -- tied for second among all players in through balls completed -- but he’s also the defensive midfielder on the team that’s giving up the highest-quality shots (0.19 non-penalty expected goals per attempt) in the tournament. Those two things are not unrelated. Plus, both Pedri and Jordi Alba have been more important to Spain’s ability to break defenses open than Busquets. If Spain wins and Busquets wins, it’ll be similar to when Modric won: recognition of a wonderful career spent doing the things that allowed others to shine.
However, among the names listed above, Danish inverted-wing back Joakim Maehle might actually be the best player through five matches. He’s leading everyone in the competition with 12 carries into the penalty area, he’s third behind Aymeric Laporte and Pedri in progressive carries, he’s somehow second in shots on target behind Patrick Schick with seven, and he’s top 10 in passes into the penalty area. He’s scored twice, assisted once, and really has just done a little bit of everything across all aspects of play. That pass against the Czech Republic defied multiple laws of both geometry and physics:
“ATALANTA!” and “right-footed defenders playing on the left” are two of the major throughlines through five games of the tournament, so it’d be somewhat fitting if a right-footed left wing-back from Atalanta ended up as the defining player of Euro 2020. But maybe the current lack of a clear defining player illustrates what makes international football so silly and cruel and compelling in equal parts: ultimately, everything comes down to just two games.
All stats come from the site FBref. Some definitions:
-Progressive passes: “Completed passes that move the ball towards the opponent's goal at least 10 yards from its furthest point in the last six passes, or any completed pass into the penalty area. Excludes passes from the defending 40% of the pitch”
-Progressive carries: “Carries that move the ball towards the opponent's goal at least 5 yards, or any carry into the penalty area. Excludes carries from the defending 40% of the pitch”
-Shot-creating actions: “The two offensive actions directly leading to a shot, such as passes, dribbles and drawing fouls. Note: A single player can receive credit for multiple actions and the shot-taker can also receive credit.”
Pedri