If the national team wins in Georgia on Thursday and repeats the trick next Tuesday against Greece or Kazakhstan, a seismic event will hit the Luxembourg football field. The country will prepare to lose a signature part of its football scene as Paul Philipp, the president of its football federation, will appear on live television to shave off the mustache he has worn for more than forty years. If it does happen, Philipp will likely navigate a whirlwind of emotions and conclude that the ordeal was worth it.
That’s because Luxembourg, ranked 85th in the world by FIFA, is two wins away from a place at the 2024 European Championship, a statement that would once have seemed like fantasy. Going into the qualifiers, their previous 56 matches had yielded 15 points at that stage; Attempts to reach the European Championship or World Cup have often ended scoreless or scoreless and although they were not part of the San Marino group, they were for decades considered among the smallest boys on the continent.
Now Luxembourg has football fever. Big screens and public viewings will pop up across the grand duchy, whose population of 660,000 has rarely had the chance to be so excited about sporting success, in time for the first leg of the play-offs in Tbilisi. They will come en masse to see Place Guillaume II, a large square in Luxembourg City; the scene will be repeated from north to south for a national event that few could ever have predicted with confidence.
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“Stress is starting to set in,” admits Luc Holtz, the long-serving manager who has overseen extraordinary progress. Luxembourg’s steady improvement had captured the attention, at least of those watching closely, for the better part of a decade, but the quiet development has exploded into concrete results. Despite being defeated twice by Portugal in qualifying Group J, they achieved a double over Bosnia & Herzegovina, headed to impressive Slovakia and picked up four points against Iceland. Evidence emerged that Holtz’s players could, at worst, consistently mix with the European mid-tier teams.
That’s why no one should write off their chances of conquering two more. Luxembourg is certainly an outsider in a Path C quartet, where one wants to see Georgia and the wizardry of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia play against the 2004 winners, Greece, in the final. But a look at Holtz’s squad bears no resemblance to the group of semi-professionals, supplemented by a number of players who had made it in the neighboring leagues and were bracing themselves for damage control.
They are led in midfield by the talented Leandro Barreiro, a 24-year-old who has already amassed 133 Bundesliga appearances for Mainz and will join Benfica this summer. The tall and elegant Christopher Martins, who chose to continue his career at Spartak Moscow after showing his pedigree at Lyon and Young Boys, should partner him. Mica Pinto, a left back who plays for Vitesse, is another experienced head in a group that draws on Luxembourg’s sizable Portuguese community and also includes players from France, Belgium, Austria, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Norway, Switzerland , Ukraine and Slovakia.
Up front, Holtz will continue to select Gerson Rodrigues, who is on loan from Dynamo Kiev to Slovan Bratislava, even as the 28-year-old’s assault charge, which he has denied, hangs over him. Rodrigues’ trial will take place on March 27, a day after the play-off final. Holtz recalled him last October, having dropped him from the previous three matches for disciplinary reasons, as the prospect of qualifying for the 2024 European Championships through the conventional route became increasingly real. Luxembourg finished third in their group but Holtz believes Rodrigues, the country’s all-time top scorer with 20 goals, has the star quality to see them through this month.
Luxembourg can thank the Nations League for their great opportunity: their performance at that level, in League C, secured their place in the play-offs. When The Guardian visited in 2018 and saw them start life in UEFA’s new competition by conquering Moldova, the opportunity before them was clear. They were quickly promoted from League D and the extra competitive action, which has seen them surpass teams previously considered their equals, has ingrained a winning habit. Getting the results gave them confidence playing on the front foot.
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Much of the vision that Philipp, a local legend who led the team between 1985 and 2001, formulated five and a half years ago has paid off. At the time, he spoke of perfecting a production line that would ensure that Luxembourg’s national football school, which was founded just after the turn of the millennium, would produce youngsters who could make the transition to bigger foreign clubs at an early stage. Martins and Barreiro are among the products; this also applies to David Jonathans and Aiman Dardari, who are on the books of Bayern Munich and Mainz respectively. The latter pair is in the selection for Georgia.
Given their underdog status, it is a blow that Danel Sinani, the influential former Norwich and Huddersfield winger, now at German side St. Pauli, will be missing through suspension. The neat attacking midfielder Vincent Thill and defender Dirk Carlson are out due to injury. But Kvaratskhelia are also suspended as Thursday’s hosts and return for each final, and a Luxembourg team that has grown confident in tackling tough away games can feel confident negotiating another one.
“We have to avoid getting carried away by emotions, myself included,” Holtz said. If they were to do so successfully, they would be a step further from qualifying at least on par with Iceland’s extraordinary achievement in reaching Euro 2016. It would leave Philipp having to prepare the shaving cream too.