Renowned journalist Mykola Nesenyuk shared his thoughts on the eve of the Euro 2024 play-off final match between Ukraine and Iceland, which will take place today in Wroclaw.
"On the eve of our national team's match against Iceland, I came across a sign with the 'price' of our players. It looked like a price tag in a shop - pork so much, beef so much, lamb so much, veal so much, chicken so much... I understand that the current generation of football "observers" is somewhat dazed by the excess of easily accessible information and tries to make a price for itself by using numerous numbers and foreign terms. But not to this extent!
So I will try to remind you of something. A footballer's skill is not only about the ability to perform certain techniques, "advance the ball", "close the areas" and everything else that is now actually counted by a computer through the sensors that are hung around poor players. Skill, in my opinion, is the ability to show all your best abilities at the right time, winning a tackle, striking, taking the ball away, making a pass. How many times do we see a footballer make a wrong decision at a crucial moment and negate the team's efforts? Everyone wonders how this is possible. It's very simple - no sensor can yet get into the player's head and explain what exactly guides him when he decides to play this way.
To do this, you need to understand the phenomenon of a football team as a single organism, where the actions of one player can either bring victory or defeat. What do the "price tag" signage tell us? That the player on the left "costs" twice as much as the player on the right, so he must automatically play twice as well. In reality, this is not the case. Otherwise, a well-known Ukrainian footballer would now be a star in the English Premier League, not a rotation player in one of its clubs. Because if you use "price tags", you don't have to go out on the field at all - just calculate who has the most expensive squad and determine the winner before the game.
Today, it is not the total cost of the players that will bring victory, but the ability of the coaches to choose the best squad, the ability of the players to execute the coach's game plan, showing all their skills and luck, which we hope will be on the side of Serhiy Rebrov's team!" Neseniuk wrote on his Facebook page.