Euros continue to serve up goal fest as playing styles collide to dazzling effect

The Guardian

4 days ago

And frankly, have you not been entertained? If, of course, we are willing to stretch our definition of 'entertainment' to include some of the other popular sensations. Suspense. Terror. Existential despair. Cold sweating. Temporary breakdown of the nervous system. Loud screaming at inanimate items of electrical equipment.
But as we approach the final week of this operatic Women's European Championship, this tournament has a fair claim to be one of the most thrilling in recent memory. And not just on the more intangible metrics: noise, penalty drama, side-eye, flying saves, players singing unprompted into pitch-side microphones, quality of fan walks. With three matches remaining, Euro 2025 has surpassed Euro 2022 in terms of goals, averaging a staggering half a goal more (3.57 against 3.06).
This is on course to be the highest-scoring European Championship in history, excluding the limited four-team mini-competitions that were held before 1997. Only two tournaments ago, Euro 2017 averaged just 2.19 goals per game. A 63% rise in goals constitutes a seismic and really quite sudden development in the sport, one that raises a few supplementary questions. Have attacks got better? Have defences got worse? And, you know, what if some of these players actually learned to take a penalty?
Perhaps the key finding here is that possession is no guarantee of control. If you exclude blowouts such as England 6 Wales 1 and include only matches between teams of roughly comparable strength (say, within 10 places of each other in the Fifa world rankings) then the team enjoying more possession has won just six games out of 17. The Netherlands had more of the ball against France and were demolished 5-2. Meanwhile, Norway's 2-1 win against Finland was secured with just 41% of possession.
Winning games without possession generally requires one of a few to be true: a preponderance of set-piece goals, a reliance on fast direct attacks or a knack of being able to burgle the ball in the final third. None of which appears to be a disproportionate factor here. Set-piece goals are down compared with three years ago. The number of 'direct attacks', as defined by Opta, is at a similar level.
Pressing, meanwhile, remains a potent weapon in the women's game, perhaps even more so than in the men's game, where elite teams are now much more adept at playing through pressure, perhaps even baiting the press to create space. But at this tournament the number of successful tackles in the final third is actually down 23%. There were 708 high turnovers at Euro 2022 and just 495 so far at Euro 2025. Mis-controls per game are down from 38.1 to 35.2, which suggests an overall rise in technical quality. So where, exactly, are all these extra goals coming from?
Dig a little deeper into the data, however, and a more revealing picture emerges. The number of high turnovers may have dropped sharply, but they have become vastly more efficient in generating goals (one in 33, compared with one in 54). The number of errors leading to a shot has more than doubled. All of which indicates that teams are becoming far more surgical, sophisticated and ruthless in their attacking tactics, targeting them in areas of the pitch, phases of the game and perhaps even particular opponents where they will have maximum value.
Underpinning all this is perhaps the biggest shift in the last three years: the quality of finishing. The 87 non-penalty goals at Euro 2022 were scored from 98.4 expected goals (xG); the 92 non-penalty goals at Euro 2025 have been scored from an xG of just 84.4. Simply put, teams are getting better at converting from virtually all situations, and arguably better at identifying the situations best suited to their style.
Direct one-on-one dribbling has been a particular speciality of France and Sweden, the only teams to generate more than 10% of their shots through this method. Italy have created more shots from dead balls than anyone else. And England remain the undisputed queens of penalty-area chaos, generating almost three shots per game from following up on shots that have just been taken.
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The broader picture, however, is one with which anyone who has watched the development of women's football over the last few years will be familiar: a sharp rise in attacking quality and tactical sophistication that has not – so far – been matched by a similar rise in defensive skillsets.
What, if anything, does any of this tell us about this week's semi-finalists? Perhaps the key lesson is that – heroic German rearguards aside – keeping it tight at the back is less important than being able to generate shots. England, Italy and Germany are only the sixth, seventh and eighth best defences in this tournament. Italy have the fifth lowest average possession, but compensate with their lightning speed of attack. Crossing remains an important tactic, with the eight quarter-finalists all in the tournament top 10 on this measure.
In many ways, though, Spain are the unicorn team at this tournament, perhaps even the unicorn team in women's football, the only side reliably able to pass their way out of trouble anywhere on the pitch. Spain aside, the teams who have gone far in this tournament are those who have been prepared to abandon the ground game and go long or direct when necessary.
And so increasingly this tournament is boiling down to a battle between two models: the passing game pioneered by Spain, and the more pragmatic style practised by everyone else. There may be many ways to entertain. But ultimately, there will only be one way to win.