Re:Football, fire and ice: the inside story of Iceland’s rem...
by gwern on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @05:39PM
(#13647952)
They do mention it:
"For all the alluring backstory, questions still remain. Chiefly there is that brittleness. Iceland are ready. Iceland have a great system. But are they actually any good? Most riffs on this story tend to overlook the fact Iceland had plenty of luck in qualifying.
The expanded tournament helped. Other teams played poorly. Iceland tended to sit behind the ball, scoring from knockdowns and set pieces. Even in the key home defeat of Holland they had 26% of possession."
Having said that it's unbelievable how a publication like The Guardian can write an article about UEFA 2016 with claims like "smallest nation ever to reach a major tournament", without mentioning that 2016 is the first year where 24 teams compete, instead of 16 as has been the case since 1996. Before that it was 8 for a while, and 4 when the tournament first started in the 60s.
Iceland's been getting consistently better at football for decades now, and it beat England last year in the tournament showing that it could play with the big boys. But obviously if the tournament is expanded from 16 to 24 teams, an increase of 50%, it's going to be the first year that some small team qualifies.