Amr Obaid (Cairo)
The Italian national team took the qualification card as “runner-up” in the second group with difficulty, contenting itself with a score of 4 points and a success rate of 44.4%, to come on the list of the weakest harvest in the history of the “title holders”, who succeeded in passing the first round in the next tournament, apart from the 4 times that witnessed The “defending champion” was eliminated from the group stage in the next edition, noting that the European Championship witnessed the failure of the “champion” to qualify for the next tournament 3 times.
Among the “champions” who began the campaign to defend their “cups” by surpassing the group stage, the “Azzurri” comes at the bottom of that list, as was the case with Portugal in the last edition, where the “sailors” also collected 4 points with the same success rate, 44.4%, but rather “The Seleção” did more than that by occupying third place, and had it not been for changing the tournament system, the “holder of the Euro 2016 title” would not have qualified for the next round in the 2020 edition, as he qualified among the best thirds at the time. What is strange is that Denmark, the holder of the 1992 championship title, had the same score and percentage. In the 1996 edition, but his third place in the group did not qualify him for the start of the “qualifiers” according to the old system.
The Dutch team is considered to have the best results for the “defending champion” in the group stage of the next tournament, as the “Orange” team scored 5 points out of 6 in the 1992 edition, with two wins and a draw, recording a success rate of 83.3%, and ranked first in the group at that time, followed by France. In the 2004 edition and Spain in 2012, after each of them collected 7 points, with a success rate of 77.8%, both of them also came in first place in each group at the time.
“La Roja” also appeared closely in the 2016 edition, when it gained 6 points from two victories and one defeat, achieving at that time a success rate of 66.7%, which gave it second place in the group and the qualification card, and despite Czechoslovakia passing from the group stage in the 1980 tournament, with 3 points out of 6 with a success rate of 50%, except that the “holder of the 1976 edition” played the third-place match directly according to the rules for the second-place finishers in each group, while the same score and percentage did not save Germany from being eliminated from the group stage in the 1984 tournament, as He then ranked third.
Finally, the Greek and German national teams were at the bottom of the historical list of champions who appeared in the league of the following group groups in general, as they both occupied last place in the group, and the situation was “disappointing” for the “descendants of the Greeks,” because the holder of the 2004 edition of the tournament emerged with a “zero” result from the league. Groups, after losing all their matches in the 2008 tournament, while the “Machines”, the 1996 champions, were content to score one point out of a total of 9 in the next edition in 2000, after a draw with Romania and two defeats, the least harsh of which was at the hands of England before falling with the “humiliating treble” to Portugal via “Hat-trick” by Sergio Conceicao.
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