In the 118th minute in Stuttgart, in Germany’s quarter-final against Spain, nothing existed other than football. Not the country’s politics, not its division, not its job or housing markets.
Sport will do that. It will draw you in, put your life on hold. For the last few weeks, Germany has been a swaying carnival of white and pink, with everyone determined to live like it was 2006 all over again.
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Yet in the 119th minute, Mikel Merino’s header first hung in the air, teasing, and then dropped into the back of the net. It turned the nation’s blood cold and buckled its legs.
That part was exactly like 2006. Eighteen years ago, Fabio Grosso’s curling shot in Dortmund punched a young German team square in the gut, stopping the story of that summer dead in its tracks.
But 2024 feels worse. Merino’s goal sent Spain to the next round. It also brought reality rushing back in.
The far right is on the rise. The trains do not work. Football is just sport.
Germany are out.
After the game, the wurst were still being served and the beers were still being poured and sold but to fans bewildered by what they had just seen.
Momentum is unkind. When it turns, everything can start to feel inevitable. Germany had that on Friday night: their 89th-minute equaliser created one of the loudest noises that stadium must ever have heard, and then a surge of power which the Spanish struggled to cope with.
At worst, the Germans thought they were heading for penalties. But then came what nobody saw coming — at any point during the day.
Thomas Muller left the pitch in tears. Most likely, he has now played his 131st and final game for his country.
“I am proud to be part of this team and above all proud to be German,” he wrote on Instagram. “Let’s take this feeling without back into our daily lives during these current times.”
The most recent European elections in Germany, held just before the tournament began, showed big gains for the far-right AfD party among young voters. Recent surveys have also described increasing concern among younger people about immigration and about their economic prospects. The country is also contending with the complex issue of military rearmament.
But on Friday afternoon, most of the country seemed to cram into Stuttgart under a hot sun to have a good time — in their replica shirts, their bucket hats and their face paint.
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After the World Cup humiliations in 2018 and 2022, and a limp defeat to England at Euro 2020, this was the country’s biggest day in almost a decade, since a European Championship semi-final against France in 2016.
In Berlin, Peter Schilling sung Major Tom to an audience of thousands. In Stuttgart, Andre Schnura played his saxophone one more time.
Schilling is a star. Schnura became something else entirely. He is a music teacher who was made redundant shortly before the tournament. When Euro 2024 started, he turned up to a fan zone with a saxophone, a Rudi Voller shirt and a pair of dark glasses.
⚽️🇩🇪🇩🇰#GERDEN
Er ist der heimliche Star der @EURO2024DE: Saxophonist André Schnura reißt hier gerade mit mehr als 25.000 Fans auf der Festwiese den #Westfalenpark ab.@stadtdortmund #EURO24DO #EURO2024 pic.twitter.com/uqSmjsufWA
— Konzern Stadtwerke Dortmund (@StadtwerkeDO) June 29, 2024
By the second week, he was one of the most famous people in Germany.
When he played, it was among seas of flags and to thousands of fans grasping at him from all sides. He refused to do interviews and rejected all requests. Instead, he would appear before Germany’s games, and then vanish quickly afterwards, knowable only through his Instagram account and his long messages preaching togetherness, unity and kindness.
Nobody knew who he was a month ago. On Thursday, he was invited to play the Fourth of July celebration at the American Embassy. Even before the group stage had finished, Hamburg’s Miniatur Wunderland, the world’s largest model railway, had added him and his saxophone to their display.
It’s a story typical of how Germany’s tournament has happened away from the games. The winning dictated the mood, but the country will remember so much else. Schnura and his saxophone, Schilling and Major Tom, the pink shirts that thumbed a nose at conservatism. The cocoa powder and the mosquitoes. That long night at the Westfalenstadion, when it was battered by a biblical storm. Jamal Musiala representing the best of modern Germany. Niclas Fullkrug’s toothless grin. Toni Kroos.
The best tournaments acquire a strange nostalgia that lasts long after UEFA or FIFA has bagged everything up and left town. And that always comes from something other than the football, such as Nessun Dorma and a deep footballing romanticism at Italia ’90. Tactics and team selections are topics that last only a few weeks. What the tournament meant comes from somewhere else entirely.
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In Germany, this time that was really a determination to chase the past. This is a troubled country on an uncertain course and the seductiveness of 2006, when patriotism was suddenly fine and the fan parks were full to bursting, is plain to see. Everybody wanted a second summer fairy tale. Between Schilling, Schnura, the beautiful weather and everything else, they just about got one.
The Stuttgart fan zone was silenced by Merino’s goal. When the final whistle went a few minutes later, confirming Germany’s elimination, it was still numbed by disbelief. This time, though, their team was leaving to applause. It mattered that Germany had played well. They had been unlucky to lose. You’ll Never Walk Alone played over the sound system as the people began to leave. The upbeat chords of Don’t Stop Believin’ sent them away into the night.
Back across town, fans were drifting out of the stadium. Some despondently drunk, others with a shrug-of-the-shoulders cheer as they walked back to the station, beer cans crinkling under foot.
A bagpipe player has been trying to earn his way to a world championship by playing outside the grounds at this tournament. He has been everywhere: Munich, Frankfurt, and in Stuttgart too. Fans know him now and love him, and they stopped to give money and take pictures as they passed. Further down the road, another piper — just playing to play — is sending his shrill notes out into the night sky. German fans drape their arms around him.
Everyone is still having a good time.
The German media less so. In the hours after Germany’s elimination, tabloid newspaper Bild fires its cannons at Anthony Taylor, the English referee, because of his failure to award a penalty in extra time for a handball by Marc Cucurella.
“Our summer fairy tale has been shattered because of a prison guard from England,” they write.
On the train back into town, a man was studying the footage on his phone. He wore a Stuttgart wristband and had Deniz Undav’s name on the back of his shirt, and was asking his friends where the rumoured offside was that Taylor found to deny Germany their penalty.
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Behind him, a group of Spanish fans sung about Kroos being Spanish. A woman with them was speaking in English, German and Spanish in quick rotation. She lives just outside Stuttgart, she said, but she grew up a Real Madrid fan and Musiala should really be playing for them. Another woman, older, with one of her cheeks painted red, black and gold, is prodding at her son, trying to get him to laugh.
Further down, younger German supporters could be heard banging the side of the carriage, chanting away.
“Berlin, Berlin, wir fahren nach Berlin!”
They are not going to Berlin; not to watch Germany — for now, though, nobody seems to care too much.
The football was good enough. The Germans wanted their pride back and they have it. When the 2026 World Cup begins, they — still under Julian Nagelsmann’s coaching — will be a force.
“There was a sense of euphoria,” says Niclas Fullkrug. “There was a sense of community in Germany, which we also felt. That hasn’t been the case for a long time. It’s very, very sad.”
Nobody knows when Germany, the country, will feel like this again. This was a dream and it was wonderful, but it’s time to wake up.
(Top photo: Federico Gambarini/picture alliance via Getty Images)