The Expected Failure. Germany as a Football Nation.

Germany’s men’s national football team has been eliminated. Once again. That is no longer surprising. A tournament victory would now be the surprise. A series of sporting defeats has become a cultural expectation.

For older football supporters, this development seems almost surreal. After Germany’s defeat in the semi-final of the 1990 World Cup, Gary Lineker famously summed up the prevailing perception of the German national team: “Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.” Today, the opposite seems to apply. Germany is no longer among the teams others fear. It has become an opponent against whom almost every nation believes it has a realistic chance.

With the final whistle, a debate begins that extends far beyond football. Within minutes, the discussion is no longer about tactics, pressing, or penalty takers. Instead, commentators debate leadership, work ethic, social cohesion, and the condition of Germany itself. A sporting defeat becomes the occasion for national self-examination. That national teams stand for nations is part of the logic of international football. The more interesting question is this: why are sporting defeats so readily interpreted as diagnoses of a country’s condition? Often, only a few minutes separate the end of a match from a national diagnosis.

The concept of the nation brand offers one possible answer. Nation brands do not determine what happens. They determine which events acquire which meaning. They condense history, the present, and expectations of the future into a public narrative. They select what is remembered, repeated, retold, and anticipated. In doing so, they shape not only how a country is perceived by others but also how it understands itself. That the elimination of a national team can become a debate about Germany within minutes is therefore not a sporting fact. It is an expression of Germany’s public narrative.

This perspective remains the exception rather than the rule in the literature. Most books about football focus on the game itself – on tactics, players, clubs, competitions, or the history of the sport. Much less frequently does football become the starting point for analyzing politics, culture, or society.

Among the classics is Simon Kuper’s Football Against the Enemy (1994). Travelling through the football world immediately after the end of the Cold War, Kuper demonstrates how closely national conflicts, political upheavals, and sporting rivalries are intertwined. In Tor zur Welt. Fußball als Realitätsmodell (Gateway to the World: Football as a Model of Reality, 2004), Klaus Theweleit interprets football as a cultural and psychological model of modern society, asking what the game reveals about the organization of social life. Horst Bredekamp’s Florentiner Fußball. Die Renaissance der Spiele. Calcio als Fest der Medici (Florentine Football: The Renaissance of Games. Calcio as a Festival of the Medici, 1993) demonstrates that football in Renaissance Florence was far more than a game. It served political representation, elite self-fashioning, and the cultivation of republican virtues.

This essay focuses on Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2004). The title alone makes the boldest claim. Football appears not merely as a mirror of particular social developments but as a key to understanding the world. When Foer published the book, globalization was the dominant interpretive framework of the age. His chapters tell stories of globalization: Serbian nationalists, religious divisions in Scottish football, Jewish identities at Ajax Amsterdam and Tottenham Hotspur, FC Barcelona and Catalan nationalism, the global transfer market for Brazilian talent, Ukrainian oligarchs, corruption in Italian football, the hopes invested in Iranian football, and finally the uneasy place of football in the United States. Again and again, Foer shows how political, economic, and cultural conflicts converge in football. Football is not a sideshow of history. It is its magnifying glass. Yet rereading the book reveals that the title promises more than the book ultimately delivers. Foer does not develop a theory through which football explains the world. He demonstrates how the world can be observed through football.

Foer’s book asks a different question from the one pursued here. He is interested in what football tells us about the world. We are interested in what nations tell themselves through football. It is not the game that explains the nation. Rather, the nation’s public narrative explains the meaning of the game. Football does not explain the world. It narrates nations. Football condenses ideas about who we are, how we wish to be seen, and how others see us. From these narratives emerges the nation brand – the condensed public narrative of a country. Nations no longer appear merely as political or cultural communities. They are also public narratives. States compete for attention, trust, investment, talent, and sympathy. They construct images of themselves while simultaneously being defined by the images created by others. Between self-image and external image, the nation brand takes shape.

National teams are among the most visible expressions of these narratives. They do not simply represent a nation. They embody its nation brand. Every major tournament confirms, reshapes, or unsettles a country’s public narrative. Victories and defeats therefore acquire meanings that extend far beyond sport.

At the same time, every national team possesses its own history, identity, and brand. This team brand is not identical with the nation’s brand. Over long periods, however, the two may become closely intertwined. Qualities attributed to a team gradually become part of the public narrative about the country itself. This is precisely what happened over decades in the case of Germany’s national team.

A defeat is, first of all, a sporting event. Only the nation brand transforms it into a statement about the country. The same defeat may therefore be understood in entirely different ways: as an unfortunate accident, the beginning of a crisis, or confirmation of what people already believe about a nation.

For decades, the German national team was associated with an extraordinarily stable narrative. It stood for tournament resilience, reliability, and the ability to surpass itself precisely when circumstances were most difficult. Defeats occurred, but they never undermined the expectation that Germany would ultimately prevail. The remarkable stability of this narrative made it part of Germany’s public story. The national team did not merely represent the Federal Republic. It embodied qualities widely associated with Germany itself: discipline, perseverance, composure under pressure, and the conviction that difficulties could always be overcome. The team’s brand and Germany’s nation brand reinforced one another.

Since winning the World Cup in 2014, however, this narrative has gradually unraveled. Coaches have changed, concepts abandoned, generations replaced. More importantly, the taken-for-granted assumption that this team represented a particular idea of Germany has faded. The defeat against Paraguay therefore marks no turning point. It confirms a longer-term transformation. The penalty shootout tells no new story. It simply becomes another chapter in a story that has long been unfolding.

This points to a second observation that extends beyond football. Among European nation states, Germany occupies a distinctive position. The experience of historical rupture forms part of the core of its public self-understanding. Unlike many other nations, Germany tells its history not despite its breaks but through them. Confronting the catastrophes of the twentieth century is not peripheral to German identity. It lies at its center.

From a democratic perspective, this constitutes an achievement. A society that remains conscious of its historical ruptures is better protected against the temptations of simplistic national self-certainties. What may appear as a weakness from the perspective of conventional branding becomes a strength from the perspective of democratic historical consciousness.

Against this background, the narratives of the national team and of Germany itself now merge with remarkable ease. The defeat against Paraguay does not confirm the condition of Germany. It activates a narrative that already exists. Because Germany tells its own history as one of rupture and self-examination, sporting setbacks are readily interpreted as symptoms of a broader national condition. The match becomes an occasion to continue telling a story that is older than this team and older than this tournament.

What has become normal is not failure itself. What has become normal is the expectation of failure. Only this expectation transforms individual defeats into confirmations of an already existing narrative. In this way, Germany’s public narrative changes. An exception becomes a pattern, the pattern becomes a narrative, and the narrative becomes an expectation.

Many actors compete to define the meaning of a match: politicians, journalists, football officials, and both genuine and self-appointed experts. They interpret, comment on, and evaluate the game. In doing so, they reinforce or reshape public moods. Yet which interpretation ultimately prevails is decided neither in press conferences nor in newspaper headlines. It emerges through public contestation over the story a nation wishes to tell about itself. The German Chancellor’s attempt to frame the defeat as a story of unity and pride met with strong opposition. This demonstrates that the struggle is not only over matches but also over their meaning. A nation’s public narrative cannot simply be decreed. It emerges through competing interpretations.

With Jürgen Klopp, Germany now has a national coach whose ambitions extend far beyond tactics, training, or team selection. International media coverage of his appointment focused above all on one statement: that football could change not only a city but, ideally, an entire country. The Guardian described Klopp’s objective as an effort “to transform a deeply fractured relationship between the national team and Germany’s public,” quoting him as saying: “I’ve lived and experienced how football can change a city. … Ideally, football can change a country.” He thus explicitly draws on experiences he gained in Mainz, Dortmund, and Liverpool. But can the relationship between a club and its city really be compared to that between a national team and a nation?

This question points to more fundamental reflections on the relationship between football and nationhood. A renewed reading of Foer reveals how social conflicts become condensed in football. Taken one step further, football makes visible the stories nations tell about themselves – and how these stories determine the meaning attributed to victory and defeat. A match never tells only what happens on the pitch. It also tells the story a nation is already telling about itself. Germany’s national football team does not explain the condition of Germany. It reveals the story Germany tells about itself. The narrative does not change the result of the match. It changes its meaning.