Comment: UEFA is not exploiting the potential of the Junior Euros. Semi-final matches have already been seen in the group stage

For many youngsters, this is the tournament of a lifetime, where they can sell themselves to the world club. Yet the U21 EURO is often underestimated in some of football’s leading countries. However, UEFA is going against this attitude with certain decisions. Both towards the players and the spectator.

When readers open the Sky Sports website after the England senior national team match, several different articles pop up that break down the details.

The young Albion have not won at the U21 tournament so far this year, they are in the semi-finals, yet the most widely read British media outlet pays almost no attention to the youngsters’ success.

For England, it is still quite understandable, because unlike other European countries, they cannot qualify for the Olympics from the tournament. The latter is under the auspices of Great Britain, so its footballers cannot get to the Games at all.

VAR is everywhere nowadays

UEFA also contributes to the frivolous approach of the European giants. The decision to use VAR only from the knockout phase onwards was absolutely absurd. Video is still incomprehensibly absent in the Conference League, otherwise almost every professional competition in Europe has it.

Looking at the tournament motivation of the referees, most of whom were gaining their first proper experience on the international stage, the presence of VAR would have been a real boon. Belgium, for example, would have kicked a clear penalty against Georgia that would have sent them into the knockout stages.

Thus, the combination of inexperienced referees combined with the absence of VAR gives the impression that UEFA is treating the UEFA Youth EURO as an irrelevant tournament where it doesn’t want to spend money and its main goal is to groom promising referees before the upcoming European Championships in Germany.

A play-off system that hasn’t been mastered

From a spectator’s point of view, the schedule of matches in the knockout phase is particularly uninteresting. Teams from the same groups incomprehensibly did not go to different sides of the pavilion and the semi-finals will offer matches that have already been seen at the tournament.

The Israel vs. England and Spain vs. Ukraine matches are thus a recap of the group stage, which is not much of a draw for the unbiased viewer. Yet, if the system made sense, there could have been a clash of giants (Spain vs. England) and dwarfs (Israel vs. Ukraine).

Source: UEFA