Tehrantimes - You have to divide the Euro 2016 in Sportive side and Marketing side. From marketing side the Championship was very successful.

A total of 24 countries could see their teams, which brought a lot of new TV Records and better marketing of commercials. And of course more sponsoring etc. But from Sportive side we can’t say the same. The quality of this Championship was low, most of the matches was boring.  In this tournament, for example, I was able to talk on the phone while watching the game at the same time, and I could read something. I was able to get out without missing anything.

The increase of the European Championship field to 24 teams had not affected the quality of play at Euro 2016. Most of the matches had maximum 4-5 goal positions in 90 Minutes. And the next problem was the amount of matches for the players of the big teams. Players like Cristiano Ronaldo or Antoine Griezmann play around 70-80 Matches every year. How they can recover? How the body can response on this pushing? How they can motivate and concentrate all the time? They are not robots!

I think we have too much Football now, every day is Football on TV. That’s a overloading of football for the fans. I enjoyed watching Germany, Spain and Italy matches in this edition. Germany and Spain controlled the games and create a lot of goal chances; however Spain has not the forwards like Barcelona has. They don’t have a perfect finisher at the moment. Otherwise, they would win the Championship. Similar problem was for Germany. After Gomez’s injury they didn’t had any Central Forward to replace him and Muller played a terrible Tournament.  

Italy played great team work combined with fast changing from Team Defence to Team Attack. Italian coach Antonio Conte does a great Job, but at the end the missing individual quality in his team stopped them from making a surprise.  From a coach view, the biggest move was made by the Portuguese coach Fernando Santos in the final game. When he put Eder in, he changed the Game. Now Portugal was able to control with this central forward the ball on the French side and at the end he scored also the Final Goal. At the same time, Didier Deschamps made the mistake to change Olivier Giroud with Andre-Pierre Gignac, because Arsenal striker was like the playmaker and space opener for Griezmann.

Gignac is only a central forward, not creative like Giroud. After this change Griezmann didn’t had any positive situation anymore. But that’s football, and that’s why milliards of people like this sport so much.