Looking for a Hero

When the European Championships, the world's second most prestigious football tournament, after the World Cup, kick off on June 7 in Basel, Switzerland, all the talk will be of the beautiful game and the transcendent talent that will decide the winner. Millions of Europeans will cling to their TV sets as 16 nations slug it out in 31 games in 8 cities in Switzerland and Austria, the joint hosts of the quadrennial series. There will no doubt be great moments and close calls. But if recent history is any guide, when the final whistle blows on June 29, the event is more likely to be remembered for goats' horns than heroism.

Why is it that football's biggest games seem to lend themselves to the sport's most dramatic failures? The World Cup is full of examples, from Roberto Baggio's missing high in the '94 championship shoot-out to French captain Zinedine Zidane's getting himself tossed for head-butting a lippy Italian defender in the '06 final. Or take last month's Champions League final in Moscow, which pitted England's Chelsea against Manchester United. There Man U's Cristiano Ronaldo—one of the game's biggest stars, who is sure to grab attention at the Euro Cup this month—seemed to freeze on his path to the ball during the final, tie-breaking shoot-out, firing weakly into the goalkeeper's chest. Thanks only to another blooper on the Chelsea side did Man U manage to eke out the crown.

There are many reasons that so many of football's biggest games are remembered not for their achievements but for their blunders. Championship finals tend to be cautious, low-scoring affairs where every play is magnified. The grueling conditions of a contest, 90 minutes of regulation play followed by 30 minutes of overtime in the all-too-common event of a tie, leave the players weak-legged and, apparently, quite often brain-dead. And the decisive penalty shoot-outs—two of the past four World Cups have ended with one—lend themselves to dramatic failures, given the high rate of success on penalty kicks. It is rare that even a goalkeeper's dramatic save is attributed to something other than a flawed shot.

What's more, national-team contests like the Euros or the World Cup are bedeviled by the age-old conflict between club and country. Glamour teams like Chelsea and Bayern Munich are often loath to release their top players for national-team training, lest it interfere with their club performance. That often leaves little time to weld the all-stars into a smoothly integrated team. This year, exhibit A of this conundrum was England, whose cobbled-together lineup astonishingly failed even to qualify for the Euros—despite (or perhaps because of) Britain's powerful clubs that dominate the continent in the Champions League.

Still, with a star-studded cast at the Euros (even absent England), there is every reason to believe a hero could emerge. Here are seven likely candidates:

Michael Ballack. The Chelsea midfielder returns to Germany to captain his home country's team, which the British betting agents last week gave the best odds to win this year. Known for his precision passing and powerful shot, the 31-year-old has adapted brilliantly to the frenetic pace of top-level British football.