EU leaders focus on the football.

The timing was suspicious. After the first afternoon and evening sessions of the European Council on Thursday (28 June), a press conference was called at just before 10.30pm. Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark’s prime minister, and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, came out to tell the television cameras that so far there was no agreement on anything. Indeed, so empty was their message that it seemed that the press conference’s only purpose was to advertise that they were not watching the semi-final of the European football championships, the Germany v Italy game, which was still in its closing stages. 

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If that was the intended ploy, it did not work: instead they came across as people who had been watching, but were leaving early because the result was no longer in doubt.

The interaction between the football and attempts to rescue the eurozone ought surely to be examined by students at the College of Europe. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, asked Mario Monti, Italy’s prime minister, for the Rome summit between the leaders of the eurozone’s four biggest countries to be brought forward so that she could attend Germany’s match against Greece.

In Berlin last week, Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, said that he did not want there to be a conference call between Eurogroup finance ministers after the Greek election because that would clash with the Germany game. If you add to that the lesson of the game played during the European Council itself – that the German team was not invincible – there is surely material for a plausible hypothesis that the distraction of football is good for the euro.

What we should all worry about is what will happen to the euro when government leaders are paying attention.