The first European soccer championship, held in 1960, was a shambles.
The idea was proposed by a Frenchman, Henri Delaunay, which was problematic. Since no one else had thought of it first, no one wanted to cede the credit.
Negotiating the details was so politically vexing, it took Delaunay 30 years to get it off the ground. He died five years before kickoff.
As was their habit at the time, the English soccer establishment wanted nothing to do with the continent and took a pass. So did the Italians and the West Germans. Until the last moment, they couldn't find 16 countries to join the qualifying tournament. (Fifty-three nations tried their hand for the current Euro).
The Spanish showed up, but when they were slotted to play the Soviet Union in the semis, their fascist government withdrew the team.
France failed to make the final, causing local interest to collapse. Paris's Parc des Princes was less than half full as the Soviets beat Yugoslavia to claim the inaugural title.
In many important ways, the Euro began coming together as Europe did likewise.
When we look back on this continent's modern golden age, it will be situated some time around the end of the 20th century. It wasn't expressed just in terms of great change, but in a coming together. Everything seemed to work then. This was where you wanted to be.
As it applied to soccer, France was at the centre of that. It was host of and won the 1984 iteration of the Euro that is thought of as its first real flowering as a global sports spectacular. The French won in 2000, the best of these, and maybe the most satisfying one-off sports event in history.
Now, as things begin to unravel, France looks the likeliest team to win again. This country is European soccer's bellwether – there when it mattered, at the centre of it all when things were beginning, peaking and perhaps ending.
Looming over this show is the hard-to-mistake general dissatisfaction with the thing that connects most of the participants – membership in the European Union.
A great deal has been made locally of aggressive police tactics in response to intermittent fan disruptions. Riot cops, who are omnipresent in huge numbers at each game, have spent the past week distributing tear gas to needy English tourists in Marseille and Lille.
A faction of the English support – the blind drunk part – takes a good bit of the blame, given that one of their handy chants is: "Sit down if you hate the French." (Everyone is meant to be sitting already. Hilarious.) Another is, "F- off Europe, we're all voting out."
Britain's referendum on whether to leave the EU takes place on Thursday.
Two days later, if things continue as they have done, England will play its first game in the knockout rounds. There is every possibility the English will enter this tournament as Europeans and leave it as dissenters to that national experiment.
If they go, this could be England's (and Scotland's, and Wales', and Northern Ireland's) last Euro.
If possible, the French are even less enamoured with Europe at the moment. In Britain, just under half of those polled would like to leave. In France, it's as high as 60 per cent (though that's complaining that has, as yet, no proposed consequence).
As revolted as they might be by England's boozed-up vandals littering their public squares with flung pint glasses, some notable French talking heads applaud their zeal for secession.
"I'd love it if the English gave the starting signal for the dismantling [of Europe]," French novelist and political arsonist Michel Houellebecq said this week. "I hope they won't disappoint me."
Houellebecq mustn't be much of a fan. Otherwise, he'd know that when England and soccer are in the midst of collision, disappointment is generally the chemical result.
As Canadians, we've been here before, deploying similar torqued arguments, if not on the same specific topics, then in the same shrill manner.
Brexit is, at its core, a fight about the other: identifying him, separating him out and then removing yourselves – the pure bloods – from his midst.
You know you are dealing with a nasty bit of business when one side will not speak out loud what it actually means. Instead, it engages in slippery code wording.
The British who would leave Europe aren't interested in disengaging from Germans or Italians. What they want is nothing to do with the people currently washing up on the borders of those countries in dinghies or on foot. Those people don't need to say the word "dirty" before "foreigner," but it's hanging there, parenthesized and very well understood. At the least, the nitwits being chased around the port of Marseille have the courage to say it out loud.
How do you counter an argument that is never actually tabled and discussed in any useful way? You do it through the deployment of symbols.
That is why the timing of Euro 2016 seems so portentous. Trade agreements and a parliament may be what connect Europe, but soccer is what binds Europeans.
Ask an Englishman to name a Swede, any Swede. I'll bet the vast majority start with Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
A Pole? Bayern Munich's Robert Lewandowski.
A Hungarian? Ferenc Puskas (though he's been dead nearly 10 years).
As an outsider, you see this familiarity in action on a daily basis. These people don't know each other, but they do recognize one another. It may be in terms of crude stereotypes (when the Swedes chanted "Go home to your ugly wives" at the Irish, the Irish chanted back, "You're [deleted], but your birds are fit"). But it's recognition all the same.
Almost without exception, they are delighted to reconvene after four years apart. They move in huge, diverse groups. One can only imagine the exponential positive effect of every Paddy and Sven going home to tell stories about the once-in-a-lifetime night he spent drinking with the (insert country here) fans.
That only happens because of this sport and this tournament. It is a visceral reminder of the value of community.
We won't know for another week, but in the end, it may turn out that France has had another chance to bring Europe together, and at no time more importantly than right now.