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Germany and Real Madrid Great Toni Kroos to Retire After Euro 2024 

Football - Champions League - Real Madrid Press Conference - Ciudad Real Madrid, Valdebebas, Madrid, Spain - May 8, 2023 Real Madrid's Toni Kroos during the press conference. (Reuters)
Football - Champions League - Real Madrid Press Conference - Ciudad Real Madrid, Valdebebas, Madrid, Spain - May 8, 2023 Real Madrid's Toni Kroos during the press conference. (Reuters)
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Germany and Real Madrid Great Toni Kroos to Retire After Euro 2024 

Football - Champions League - Real Madrid Press Conference - Ciudad Real Madrid, Valdebebas, Madrid, Spain - May 8, 2023 Real Madrid's Toni Kroos during the press conference. (Reuters)
Football - Champions League - Real Madrid Press Conference - Ciudad Real Madrid, Valdebebas, Madrid, Spain - May 8, 2023 Real Madrid's Toni Kroos during the press conference. (Reuters)

Toni Kroos will retire from football after trying to give Real Madrid yet another Champions League trophy and lead Germany to the European Championship title at home.

The 34-year-old German midfielder said Tuesday it was a tough decision, but that the timing felt “somehow perfect."

“I always wanted to leave at the peak of my abilities and I know, and from a lot of examples you see, that it isn’t easy, that you can miss that point in time very quickly,” Kroos said on a podcast he hosts with his brother.

“I never wanted to have the feeling at the end that the club, the fans, the people around me would have to tell me, ‘That’s enough,’ or that I’d spend another two or three years sitting on the bench.”

Madrid thanked Kroos and hailed his achievements with the team.

“Real Madrid would like to express its gratitude and affection to Toni Kroos, a player who will go down in Real Madrid history as one of our club and international football’s greatest legends,” the club said.

Kroos was a World Cup champion with Germany in 2014 in Brazil, and had a successful career with Bayern Munich as well, helping it win one Champions League and three German league titles.

Madrid will face Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League final on June 1 in London. His European trophies with Madrid came in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2022. He won the Champions League with Bayern in 2013.

Kroos has been with Madrid since 2014, helping it win 22 titles, including four European Cups and four Spanish leagues. He made 463 appearances with the club, which called the midfielder “a key player in one of the most successful periods of Real Madrid’s 122-year history.”

“Toni Kroos is one of the great players in Real Madrid history and this club will always be his home,” club president Florentino Pérez said.

Madrid said Kroos will remain forever in the hearts of every fan “thanks to his mastery of the game and the fact he has given his all for our jersey, a steadfast example of the values of Real Madrid.”

Kroos' contract with Madrid was expiring at the end of this season and the club and the player had reportedly been negotiating an extension.

Kroos said in February he agreed to play for Germany at Euro 2024 after a request from coach Julian Nagelsmann. He has not played for the national team in almost three years, since Germany’s loss to England in the second round of the last European Championship.

Kroos was named last week in Germany's preliminary squad for the tournament.

He had said a few months ago that he didn't know what would happen next season.

“I thought it over for a really long time and in the last few days I’ve reached the conclusion that this season, this wonderful season, the 10th season with Real, is also my last season with Real,” Kroos said Tuesday.

“And anyone who has paid attention when listening to me over the last few months or years will have heard the sentence at one time or other that the only option for me was to end my career at Real Madrid. And if you can put one and one together, you know that my last season with Real means it's over this summer. No more Real, no more football.”

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Men’s Olympic Soccer Remains Stuck in the Game’s Second Tier

The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. (file photo/The AP)
The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. (file photo/The AP)
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Men’s Olympic Soccer Remains Stuck in the Game’s Second Tier

The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. (file photo/The AP)
The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. (file photo/The AP)

The Poststadion still stands, about 10 minutes’ walk north-west of Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof. It’s set up for American football these days and this summer it was the centre of Berlin Pride. But in 1936, it was there that Adolf Hitler, for the only time in his life, attended a football match.

Hitler, like a lot of dictators, was suspicious of football. It was too unpredictable, the crowds that followed it too large and anarchic. But Germany had been impressive in beating Luxembourg 9-0, and nobody thought much of Norway, so Hitler, along with several other senior Nazis including Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess went to the quarter-final.
Germany’s assistant coach was Sepp Herberger, who would later lead West Germany to victory at the 1954 World Cup. He had been sent to watch Italy v Japan, the winners of which would play the winners of Germany’s quarter-final, so he was not at the Poststadion. He returned to the team base and was tucking into a dinner of knuckle of pork and sauerkraut when he saw one of the other coaches, Georg Knöpfle, return. He knew from his face it had all gone badly wrong, pushed his plate away and never ate knuckle of pork again. Germany had lost 2-0.

Italy beat Norway in the semi-final and went on to overcome Austria in the final, adding Olympic gold to the World Cup they had won two years earlier. They would add another World Cup in 1938. But their coach, Vittorio Pozzo, always said that 1936 was arguably his greatest achievement given he was in effect leading a team of students (albeit five of them subsequently turned pro). In Germany, by contrast, there was no professional football and so the host’s squad was a full-strength one.

That’s always been the problem with men’s Olympic football. Unlike the women’s game, which has no limitations on who is eligible to play, the men’s tournament has dealt with restrictions and questions of amateurism. And different countries have interpreted amateurism in different ways, with a huge bearing on results. The Uruguay team that took gold in 1924 and 1928, for instance, was undeniably brilliant but very few of their players would have met more stringent European definitions of amateurism; Jules Rimet, the president of Fifa, essentially waved them through to enhance non-European participation and to give the competition a more global feel.

That’s why from 1952 to 1988, every Olympic football gold (bar 1984 when the eastern bloc countries boycotted the games) was won by a team from a communist nation. Their players were technically state employees working in the army or the interior ministry or for various factories or unions and so were deemed amateur as they were not officially paid for playing sport. That’s not to say none of them were great teams – the Hungary of 1952 went on to reach the final of the 1954 World Cup; the fine Soviet Union team of 1956 would be devastated before the next World Cup by the conviction of their centre-forward Eduard Streltsov for rape; the Poland side of 1972 eliminated England in qualifying for the 1974 World Cup at which they finished third – but neither were they competing against the cream of the rest of the world.

After the collapse of communism, the men’s tournament has been for under-23 players, with three overage players permitted from 1996. Spain in 1992 were widely regarded as one of the great home successes of the Barcelona Olympics, and their squad did include Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique. At its most generous interpretation, there was evidence there of the beginnings of the superiority of Spanish youth development, but it would be a long time before that manifested as a major international trophy.

There were thrilling victories for Nigeria in 1996 and Cameroon in 2000, which seemed part of a more general process of improvement in African football. Since then, though, at least in terms of getting closer to challenging seriously for a World Cup, African football has largely stagnated.

Philadelphia Union midfielder Cavan Sullivan looks on during Wednesday’s game against the New England Revolution at Subaru Park in Chester, Pennsylvania.

The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. Kylian Mbappé seemingly wanted to play this time but after competing in the Euros, his club Real Madrid refused to grant him a waiver to play this summer. France’s overage players are Loïc Badé, Alexandre Lacazette and Jean-Philippe Mateta. Argentina are sending Gerónimo Rulli, Julián Álvarez and Nicolás Otamendi. Spain haven’t named a player over 24 and only two of their squad have ever won a full cap, suggesting how they regard the competition. The US, meanwhile, have named only one uncapped player, with their roster featuring 114 combined senior caps. Mali will lead the African challenge, while there will be obvious symbolism to Ukraine’s participation.

But the truth is that in men’s football, the Olympics doesn’t really matter and hasn’t done so since the advent of the World Cup, providing a tournament for all players, amateur and professional, in 1930. At best, it offers a snapshot of a political mood or provides evidence of promising young players who may develop over the decade to follow. No Olympic gold is entirely worthless, but few mean less than that in men’s football.

The Guardian Sport