When Portuguese forward Diogo Jota squared the ball across goal for teammate Cristiano Ronaldo to tap into the net against Hungary at Euro 2020, several things happened. As Cristiano wheeled away in delight, the 60,000-capacity crowd at the Puskas Arena in Budapest whistled angrily, showcasing the awesome spectacle of a filled football stadium at full emotional engagement, which COVID-19 has robbed the world of since 2020. He had equalled the long-standing international goals record set by legendary Iranian forward Ali Daei in his fifth and almost certainly final appearance at the Euro tournament.
The Portuguese Seleção had also travelled 3,000KM from Lisbon to Budapest and secured maximum points against their tough opponents backed by a raucous, partisan crowd. For UEFA, it was a postcard moment that signalled the success of the new Euro tournament hosting format as a consumer spectacle. Instead of having countries compete to solely host the tournament once every 4 years, the new format brought the competition in line with club competitions like the UEFA Champions League where teams and fans travel long distances across the continent to attend games at each other’s stadiums. This was a victory. It was also a humbling lesson for Europe’s poor cousin to the south, but how so?
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The infrastructure and logistics of Euro 2020
The most impressive thing to understand about Euro 2020’s unique hosting format is not that individual European countries have the ability and infrastructure to stage high-level tournament games at short notice. That is certainly impressive, but more important than that is the understanding of how big a logistical operation this entire thing is. UEFA has hundreds – maybe thousands – of accredited media partners and journalists, sponsors, corporate relations partnerships, government liaisons, suppliers and employees.
Staging a tournament like the Euros in a single country at the best of times is a multimillion dollar affair involving high level logistics, razor-thin efficiency margins and even political implications. Now imagine staging that tournament in the middle of a global pandemic, hosted in a distributed fashion across different European cities with different levels of public vaccination. Can you imagine the effort involved in flight and hotel bookings, equipment deliveries and personnel management on that scale? Could Africa pull off something like this? Clearly not – but not for the reason you might think.
The reason the Euro 2020 hosting format is not and cannot be feasible in Africa now or at any time in the near future is not just because African countries generally lack the necessary infrastructure and money. The actual reason is that the level of interconnectedness that such a cross-border effort requires, simply does not exist at any useful scale around the continent. The type of economic liberalism and commitment to free trade, which makes it possible to rapidly move hundreds of thousands of people and goods across Europe within hours before every game, has not permeated into Africa’s public discourse yet. Simply put, we are not ready.
Intra-European trade is a fact, not a talking point
Even in post-Brexit UK, moving people and goods across the Calais border with France is significantly easier than doing the same thing between Benin and Nigeria. The UK and France are not part of a common economic union anymore. Nigeria and Benin are both founding members of ECOWAS – supposedly a free trade zone in the mould of the EU. The EU both in form and substance is genuinely committed to the realities of regional integration and free markets within the union. Germany would never arbitrarily restrict imports of a certain commodity from Austria as part of some wrongheaded protectionist stunt, like Kenya regularly does with Ugandan farm produce.
Despite having left the EU, the UK would never – and I mean “never” in the most categorical sense of the word – arbitrarily close its border to travel and trade with France as part of some flag-waving, jingoistic effort at import substitution. Nigeria recently did just that with Benin, its closest trading partner with whom it shares several historical and ethnic ties – for 17 whole months. While we still talk about “Intra Regional Trade” like it is some sort of rare animal that nobody has ever seen before, our cousins across the Mediterranean are already living that reality.
That is why logistical spectacles like Euro 2020 are possible – because the continent of Europe respects the laws of economics above all other considerations. It is not that Europeans are innately more logical or less irrational than Africans – they did after all, spend hundreds of years fighting each other, culminating in the 2 bloodiest wars humanity has ever known. The key difference is that despite their own flag-waving tendencies, Europeans have learned to elevate pragmatism to a state above being questioned. That is why they have by a long distance, the world’s most integrated continental economy and the world’s wealthiest supranational trading bloc.
You’d think there is a lesson in there for us, but hey. Most of us would rather just watch Euro 2020 for the football and notice nothing else.
