Watching England cut through San Marino over and over and over again, whether they took the chance or wasted it, this did not feel like a game that was contributing much to the cause of international football, or to either of the teams involved.
Maybe if there had been a 90,000 crowd here, as there often is for even these mismatches, there would have been a sense of occasion and fun and enjoyment, of England putting on an exhibition for the paying fans. That said, many would have seen it all before — England had previously beaten San Marino 5-0 at Wembley in qualification for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 European Championship.
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International football has lost even more than club football from being played behind closed doors. In the Premier League and the Champions League, there is normally enough competitive quality to generate a sense of dramatic tension. In international football, there is not.
Maybe this is also an issue with the calendar. The players have been very poorly treated by the scheduling decisions made last summer. As Gareth Southgate said on Wednesday, that was when the authorities had the chance to build a calendar that was fairer on the players’ bodies. Instead, everyone demanded their own share and now the players are expected to play non-stop for years to keep the TV money coming in. International breaks always used to have two games, but this is the third break in a row (after October and November 2020) that has held three. These players have all played more than enough football this season, with plenty more to come.
The real issue with this game is whether the gulf between the teams was too much for it to be a worthwhile contest. The scoreline actually does little justice to how uncompetitive this was, especially in the first half when England looked eager to prove a point and looked like scoring every time they had possession. It took some extremely errant finishing — and some excellent saves from goalkeeper Elia Benedettini — to keep the score down. England slowed down in the second half, changes costing the side’s rhythm, and the final score ended up less than the margin by which Manchester City beat Watford in the 2019 FA Cup final on the same pitch.
But on nights like this, your eyes can sometimes tell you more than the scoreboard. This looked like such a grossly unfair mismatch that it makes you question the point. Would European football be better served by having a pre-qualification system, so that the lower-ranked nations have to play each other for the right to play the bigger countries? The Nations League, which grouped European nations into four tiers based on their UEFA coefficient in 2018, acknowledged the problem, but that tournament was set up to replace friendlies. Mismatches such as Thursday’s still exist.
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It might sound unfair to San Marino to ask them to go through the indignity of pre-qualification but other continents have pre-qualification rounds for the tournament. In Africa, 28 teams have to play a two-legged tie for the right to progress through to the group stages, and it is not just for the minnows either. Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone were 97 and 95 places ahead of San Marino in the FIFA rankings but they had to go through it in September 2019. Togo and Angola played in the 2006 World Cup and they had to go through it too.
Asia has its own equivalent competition, with a two-legged tie for its 12 lowest-ranked teams taking place in June 2019. The standard might not be as good as the African equivalent but it still serves to even out the teams who make it through to the main group stage.
England would rather be playing more competitive opposition in this, with only four games now left before the Euros. “Of course it’s not the level of game that is going to dictate how well we can do in the summer,” Southgate said afterwards. “It’s not the right level of comparable.”
It is worth wondering whether San Marino get much more out of these constant defeats, other than the sense of pride at playing at Wembley. Would the team develop from playing more competitive games and learning how to win? Or do they need to face the best to sharpen the skills? Can the right combination of fixtures turn any minnow into Iceland, or is theirs a story of investment, culture and infrastructure?
There is a tempting argument for inclusivity and against elitism here. When Southgate was asked on Wednesday whether this game should go ahead, he defended San Marino’s right to play. “Every country has the right to take part in a World Cup, in the same way that every club has the right to take part in the FA Cup,” he said. “It is part of what makes our game, the amazing stories that come up.”
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This is true, but if San Marino had to pre-qualify before the group stages, they would still be taking part in the World Cup process, just as the teams in the African and Asian preliminary rounds do. And the comparison to the FA Cup does not quite hold either.
Two months ago Marine, of the Northern Premier League Division One North West, the eighth tier of English football, hosted Tottenham Hotspur in the FA Cup third round. But they only played Spurs because they had already beaten Barnoldswick Town (ninth tier), Frickley Athletic (eighth), Runcorn Linnets (eighth), Nantwich Town (seventh), Chester (sixth), Colchester United (fourth) and Havant & Waterlooville (sixth). The right to be part of the FA Cup is inherent to every club. The right to play against Premier League giants like Tottenham Hotspur has to be earned.
That game, like this one, finished 5-0 and they felt fairly similar as contests. And just as most Spurs players would not have played a team like Marine before as senior professionals, neither will most England players have played in a game like this. Trying to judge the “true” level of a team like San Marino, who only play a few games each year and lose almost all of them, is difficult to do. Maybe if they were based outside of Europe, they could get some wins on the board and move up the rankings.
The analysts at the 21st Club have built models to rank teams’ true level and they would make San Marino “significantly worse” than teams in step two of non-League (National League South and National League North). The top division club they would most closely equate San Marino to currently sits at the bottom of the Malaysian Super League.
This might explain why watching England’s team of polished professionals play opposition like this felt so jarring. The story of modern football is one of stratification, with the elite level becoming richer, better and more distinct, all faster than ever before. Ollie Watkins will have seen a lot during his days at Weston-super-Mare but Phil Foden has played his entire senior club career for Pep Guardiola. We do not expect our stars to play in games like this.
But then part of the attraction of international football is that, at least in theory, it is less directly buyable than the club game. It can never be as developed or as refined as big-money club football but then its hierarchies are flatter as well. Faced with a problem like San Marino, and a choice between inclusivity and elitism, international football might well want to hold on to what makes it good.
(Photo: Eddie Keogh – The FA via Getty Images)
