Germany has been a team which has shown a more balanced proposal. Their coach has prepared a model in which they have tried to do three things effectively. Firstly, it is a team that has stood out for their defending as a block; they have tried to make the distances between the players on the different lines and the distances between the lines optimal at all times. They have shown very good coordination to move the block up when the opponent played backwards, always trying to free up the box of opponent players, and without any players disconnecting from the rest in their pressing movements.

Secondly, Germany has shown an associative game in the inner zones of the field. That is to say, the occupation of the spaces and the ball circulation strategies aimed to progress without putting the ball possession at excessive risk.

And thirdly, Germany has been the team that has best attacked the opposite box (with the arrival of several players, with crosses far from the opposite goalkeeper, with players who attacked the ball trajectory without waiting for it to fall and with great determination to finish the actions).

England, on the other hand, showed a less extensive repertoire. Their strengths were, on one hand, the collective tactical mastery of the transition phases (the players identified, using a common interpretation code, the same signals to attack or defend, and this allowed them to take profit of their enormous physical potential). On the other hand, the aggressiveness to attack and progress inside the opponent’s block. We often talk about aggressiveness linked to situations or episodes of the defensive phase -when a player presses, marks individually, a tackle, etc-, but the English side have shown in this championship the importance of being very aggressive in the attacking phase.

In this way, the midfielders’ support, the unmarking movements from the forwards, the driving from the central players to generate advantages, as well as those of the wide players to create crossing situations, the passes towards the teammates with more advantage, the first touches that allowed to surpass the opponent’s lines and the determination to finish the actions have been some of the details of their main quality: the implementation of an associative attacking game (like the Spanish and Germans) but with more aggressive individual and collective tactical intentions.

In the end, the team who succeeded presented a game model containing few patrons to follow but trained in an excellent way, a proposal that prioritized quality over quantity and where everything that does not help solve the problem is discarded; because less is more.