Men’s Olympic soccer remains stuck in the game’s second tier

TThe Poststadion still stands, about a 10-minute walk northwest of Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof. Today it’s set up for American football and this summer it was the center 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 many dictators, was suspicious of football. It was too unpredictable, the crowds that followed it too large and anarchic. But Germany had played impressively in beating Luxembourg 9-0, and no one thought much of Norway, so Hitler went into the quarter-finals along with several other senior Nazis, including Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.

Germany’s assistant coach was Sepp Herberger, who would later lead West Germany to victory in the 1954 World Cup. He had been sent to watch Italy-Japan, the winners of which would play the quarter-final winners of Germany, so he was not at the Poststadion. He returned to the team’s starting line-up and was enjoying a meal of pork knuckle and sauerkraut when he saw one of the other coaches, Georg Knöpfle, returning. He could see from his face that something had gone terribly wrong, pushed his plate away and never ate pork knuckle again. Germany had lost 2-0.

Italy defeated Norway in the semi-finals and Austria in the final, adding Olympic gold to the World Cup they had won two years earlier. They would add another in 1938. But their coach, Vittorio Pozzo, always said that 1936 was perhaps his greatest achievement, since he was essentially leading a team of students (although five of them later became professionals). In Germany, by contrast, there was no professional football, so the host nation was a full-strength team.

That’s always been the problem with men’s Olympic football. Unlike the women’s game, which has no restrictions on who can play, the men’s tournament has faced restrictions and questions about amateurism. And different countries have interpreted amateurism in different ways, with huge impact on the results. The Uruguayan team that won gold in 1924 and 1928, for example, were undeniably brilliant, but few of their players would have met the stricter European definitions of amateurism; in fact, FIFA president Jules Rimet waved them through in order to increase non-European participation and give the competition a more global feel.

That’s why, from 1952 to 1988, every Olympic football gold medal (except 1984 when the Eastern Bloc countries boycotted the games) was won by a team from a communist country. Their players were technically state employees working in the army or the Ministry of the Interior or for various factories or trade unions and were therefore considered amateurs because they were not officially paid to play sports. That’s not to say that none of them were great teams – Hungary of 1952 reached the final of the 1954 World Cup; the great USSR team of 1956 would be ruined before the next World Cup by the conviction of their striker Eduard Streltsov for rape; the Polish team of 1972 knocked England out of qualifying for the 1974 World Cup where they finished third – but they weren’t playing against the crème de la crème of the rest of the world either.

After the fall of communism, the men’s tournament was for players under 23, with three over-age players allowed from 1996. Spain were widely regarded as one of the great home successes of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and their squad included Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique. In the most generous interpretation, there was evidence of the beginnings of the superiority of Spain’s youth academy, but it would be a long time before this manifested itself as a major international trophy.

There were thrilling victories for Nigeria in 1996 and Cameroon in 2000, which seemed part of a wider process of improvement in African football. Since then, however, African football has largely stagnated, at least in terms of getting closer to a serious challenge for a World Cup.

The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely due to the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send big stars like Lionel Messi and Neymar. Kylian Mbappé seems wanted to play this time but after playing in the European Championship, his club Real Madrid refused him a waiver to play this summer. France’s overage players are Loïc Badé, Alexandre Lacazette and Jean-Philippe Mateta. Argentina will send Gerónimo Rulli, Julián Álvarez and Nicolás Otamendi. Spain have yet to name a player over the age of 24 and only two of their team have ever won a full cap, suggesting how they view the competition. The USA, meanwhile, have named just one uncapped player, with their squad boasting 114 combined senior caps. Mali will lead the African challenge, while there will be obvious symbolism for Ukraine’s participation.

But the truth is that the Olympics don’t really matter in men’s football, and haven’t since the advent of the World Cup, which offered a tournament for all players, amateur and professional, in 1930. At best, they offer a snapshot of a political mood or evidence of promising young players who can develop over the next decade. No Olympic gold is completely worthless, but few mean less than that in men’s football.

• This is an excerpt from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, the Guardian US’s weekly look at the game in Europe and beyond. Register for free here. Got a question for Jonathan? Email him at soccerwithjw@theguardian.com and he’ll feature the best answer in a future edition