Euro 2024 offers a kernel of something pure amid the

Our disunited continent may be suffering a crisis of identity but for four weeks we will all be watching

Almost three years ago, at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, the Euro 2024 logo was officially launched, featuring the colours of all 55 Uefa member nations in a symbolic display of continental solidarity. “It shows that in Europe we are united, we are friends,” the Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, announced of the new design. “Football is about friendship, it’s about good values, different cultures uniting.”

Friendship. Good values. Everyone united. Yes, good luck with all that. Perhaps it would be unnecessarily harsh to point out that just a few months after Ceferin spoke these words, Europe would be embroiled in its biggest land war since 1945, a crisis of identity and division from which the continent is still forlornly trying to extricate itself.