‘Football is Coming Home’ Slogan Takes Centre Stage as England Battle Spain in Epic Final

Femi Solaja

Spain and England will bring to a close a month of festival football at the Euro 2024 Cup Final tonight.

It’s a unique final match that brings together, the two teams that have remained unbeaten but one of them will have to bite the dust this evening at the Berlin stadium.

Tournament favourite and former champion, La Rojas of Spain enter tonight’s match as the only team to have achieved a perfect scoreline from the group phase till this evening when they hope to set a fresh record as

the only team to have won all their matches leading to the trophy with the famous Three Lions of England as the tool to attain this height. As for England, “Football Returns Home’ has been the slogan at the beginning of this tournament as they hope to banish the ghost of no silverware in the last 58 years ago when they won the FIFA World Cup on home soil against rivals, then West Germany 4-2 in the epic final match at the iconic Wembley Stadium in London in 1966.

And this evening in Berlin, England will have a date at the site of an infamous moment in their football history when the players gave the Nazi salute to the Olympiastadion crowd before the start of their 1938 friendly against Germany in Berlin.

Adolf Hitler was not there that day but Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess were in the crowd as England’s players raised their arms to give the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute during Germany’s national anthem ahead of the game.

Neville Chamberlain’s British government was seeking appeasement with the Nazis, hoping to head off the impending war.

The players were instructed before the match to give the Nazi salute, with the order coming from the Foreign Office for the sake of Anglo-German relations. England won 6-3 but history has not considered the incident.

England remains unbeaten after five visits to the stadium, the last a 3-2 friendly win over Germany in March 2016.

Spain, whose only previous match at the Olympiastadion was in 1942, started their European Championship campaign at the venue with a 3-0 victory over Croatia, setting the tone for their progress to the final match tonight.