Simon Kuper
Luxembourg were on a roll. They had just taken a 2-1 lead in Belgrade and were being cheered on by the Yugoslav fans. But then, in an unfortunate 14-minute spell, they conceded five goals and it was all over.
Last month, just three days after that match, Luxembourg manager Paul Philipp was called into the office of the president of the country’s football association (FA).
“I have bad news for you,” the president said. “Half an hour ago I phoned the other board members. Your contract won’t be renewed.”
Philipp should have seen this coming. In nearly 17 years in office, he had lost more international matches than any other manager in history, including all 10 of the qualifiers for this World Cup. Luxembourg’s hard-core “M-Block Fanatics” had taken to waving a Ghostbusters -style crossed-out picture of him.
However, no Luxembourg manager expects to be sacked for bad results. “I would have liked the chance to set out my vision to the whole board,” Philipp tells me.
To say that there are no more minnows in international football, that anyone can now beat anyone, is to overlook Luxembourg. The country has always been bad at soccer. But now, admitted Joel Wolff, the FA’s secretary general: “Let’s say that we have arrived at a relative nadir.”
Luxembourg too had its glory days. There was the victory over the British amateurs at the 1952 Olympics and the 4-2 win over Portugal in a qualifier for the 1962 World Cup on the day Eusebio made his debut.
And who will ever forget Paul Koch’s last-minute penalty save against Malta in 1995, which ended a dry spell of 15 years without a win? That set off a veritable run, with Luxembourg beating Malta twice and the Czech Republic once to garner 10 points in the qualifiers for Euro 96.
Things have been pretty awful since. One tends to give Luxembourg a fair amount of leeway, as it has just 422 000 inhabitants and an appalling record in football. But that does not excuse the two recent defeats in World Cup qualifiers to the Faroe Islands, whose population is 43 000.
I ask Wolff whether losing twice to the Faroes had been disappointing. “That is 100% the case,” he confirms.
And had it cost Philipp his job? “At some point there is pressure from everywhere,” Wolff admits.
It isn’t just the mighty Faroes: several other countries far tinier than Luxembourg are also better at football. Luxembourg are 144th in the Fifa rankings, below Andorra and Malta. The Faroes are 118th, while Iceland, which has a mere 276 000 inhabitants, almost 60 of whom play professional football abroad, ranks 54th.
Wolff and Philipp blame Luxembourg’s extraordinary wealth. The average Luxembourger has an income of about 30 000 a year, the highest in Europe and about twice the British average. Much of this money is spent luring fifth-rate foreigners to play in the local league.
The clubs don’t pay vast sums themselves, but they can usually find a job in a bank for a 39-year-old from the French or Belgian or German third division, and sometimes for his wife, too. “A top player here can earn 40 000 a year,” Wolff marvels.
In the latest round of league matches, the 12 clubs in the country’s highest division fielded just 48 Luxemburgers. “We’re now more or less forced to put everyone in the national team who is a Luxembourger,” says Wolff, exaggerating only somewhat. “The German football association has the same problem, if at a very different level.”
Also, extreme wealth has apparently made Luxembourgers blas about football. Philipp explains: “In Iceland, if you want to rise on the social ladder, sport is the key route, if not the only route.”
Like almost all sociological arguments made by football managers, this one is dubious, since Iceland is considerably richer than Germany or Britain.
On the other hand, if Philipp is right, the only way to improve Luxembourg’s football is to destroy the economy. Luxembourgers will have to decide where their priorities lie.
I ask Philipp whether managing Luxembourg for 17 years had not been depressing. “I wouldn’t have missed a second of it!” he replies. “There were times when we only narrowly lost to the big nations.” And there was the 1-1 draw with Belgium in Brussels back in the 1980s, the 0-0 against Scotland and, well, so on.
In any case, his job wasn’t about results. When he took charge in 1985, Luxembourg football was pretty amateurish. But in the euphoria generated by a 2-3 defeat to Germany in the early 1990s, he brought his squad together for training three times a week. He regularly had them for 10 days before matches.
“But every time we lost 5-0, this was brought into question. They said, ‘Why do you have to train so often, it’s so expensive?'”
Philipp will probably be succeeded by Alan Simonsen, Danish European Footballer of the Year in 1977 and most recently manager of the Faroes. “For Luxembourg’s football the moment has come to make a change,” Wolff says.
“But whether the new ideas will achieve improvement is another question.”