Euro 2024 the most politicised major football tournament in living memory

Outside Leipzig’s Forum of Contemporary History no one is in a hurry. It’s hump day, no need to be hurdling it. Inside the museum, which charts German separation, life and resistance in the East and reunification, nobody’s rushing either. But one person’s stride through the strasse out front does catch the eye.

Jahrhundertschritt or The Step of the Century is a sculpture by Wolfgang Mattheuer, seen as one of the most seminal works of East German art. It stops you in your own slow Wednesday tracks, this bronze figure striving forward with its bare right leg, dragged back with a military uniformed and booted left, the right arm raised in Nazi-ish salute, the left flexed with a closed Communist fist, the head and centre mostly missing.

The piece, reproduced in a number of German cities east and west, is viewed as a metaphor of the 20th century, “an aggressive, fleeing end-time figure who has lost his body and his ‘center’ is a mocking swan song for modern dictatorships” according to Die Zeit newspaper. But what of the 21st century? Mattheuer is no longer with us but the way we’re going, there may need to be a run on reproductions for capitals across the world pretty soon.

The Forum doesn’t try to find an endpoint but instead asks visitors how they feel reunification, modern Germany and its old East is doing. What do you reckon yourself, basically.

Clear or easy answers on the contemporary are in short supply. As we idled through the museum a notification from UEFA pinged on the phone. The Turkish hero who bestrode Leipzig the night before was under investigation.

Merih Demiral, the match-winner in Tuesday’s cinematic last 16 clash with Austria, had reportedly celebrated his second goal with a salute of his own, to Turkey’s extreme ethnonationalist Grey Wolves group.

Even on its down day, Euro 2024 continues to be the most politicised major football tournament in living memory. French players, primarily black and mixed race players, use every pre and post-match media session to talk the country back from the brink of a far right government; Georgia’s fairytale progress may just have helped a country at a crossroads of democracy and identity; Ukraine’s players used their presence here to try to raise again some flagging support for the country in its own conflict with Russia, Serbia, Croatia and Albania pointed fingers in a Balkan chanting conflict; hell, Jude Bellingham rescued England and may have somehow helped the Tories in the process?

As the only host city in what was formerly the GDR, Leipzig is probably the right place to be pondering all these things. But Wednesday was supposed to be an off day and, more importantly, was also a getaway day from here, the knockout classic the night before the last contest the place hosts with all remaining games taking place in the West.

Austrians trudged to the city’s stunning central train station, flags rolled up and tucked into the side pockets of backpacks, heading south, home to lick wounds and ponder what may have been. Turks had left earlier, it seemed. Most had nowhere to go to. They were already home in Germany, if not specifically Leipzig, which as a GDR city didn’t welcome the waves of Turkish gastarbeiter which Western cities had in the 1960s and 70s.

The night before, in celebrating a victory built on Arda Guler’s gorgeous playmaking talents and Mert Günok’s jaw-dropping wondersave, Turkish fans had carried their delight back into town and packed Leipzig’s late taverns and patios along the Marktplatz. But what was again striking was how many of the victory chants were in German.

When we all reconvene for quarter-final action in a couple of days, it is Vincenzo Montella’s Turks, not Germany, who have an easier path to West Berlin and the final. Euro 2024’s other home team don’t look like they’re going anywhere and certainly not going quietly. Talk to any German-Turks, with seven million of them they’re not hard found, and they’ll express something which Aladin El-Mafaalani, a leading sociologist in migration, described to the New York Times as “having two hearts in one chest”.

For so many in the old East Germany, as the forum details so vividly, one heart was ripped out of their chest and another forced in there. Street names changed overnight, Stalin and Lenin sculptures and murals wheeled in at speed. Other symbiotic hearts were often forced to beat on the other side of a militarized wall in these parts, loved ones separated for years if not decades. Reunification, you’re reminded, happened just eight Euros ago. It was at Leipzig’s Gothic St. Nicholas Church, just the other side of the Marktplatz, where the peaceful Monday Protests of 1989 finally sparked the fall of communism. Here we all are 35 years later pulling out our phones to film Turks chanting German victory songs.

These are confounding and conflicting times and the bubble of a major tournament can play tricks on you, make you forget as much. Euro 2024 is doing a better job of reminding you. But so are other scenes here. Walking back to our Dusseldorf base after the thunderous stormy last 16 night when Germany defeated Denmark and we all dived right into talk of VAR tragedy and robbery and the like, we cut through the bus terminal.

Flixbus (imagine if Michael O’Leary bought a fleet of coaches and decided he’d been treating customers too well) is having a better tournament than Germany’s trains, ferrying fans up and down the Autobahn. But the printed paper in the bus front window signalling its route stopped us in our 3am tracks more suddenly than Mattheuer’s sculpture: Dusseldorf to Kherson, 2500km and a world away.

Off to the side a father was consoling a crying son as he prepared to board. Perhaps the dad wasn’t going as far as the southern Ukrainian city which fell into Russian hands after a brutal battle before being won back in a counteroffensive. The scene suggested he was. A place that was once home, then Russian, now precariously reclaimed. What’s next? That’s the same question that Leipzig, Germany, this continent and places further afield would all appear to be pondering.

At a time when our sense of place feels like it’s being challenged relentlessly, Euro 2024 has offered something simpler: pride in place regardless. Just ask the Turks…but maybe ask them in German.