It’s awesome being a sheep sometimes ! You can be a sheep when it comes to football and an individual when it comes to other, more important things. Plenty of people do this. Not that there are many really important things anyway. Medicine, philosophy, maybe politics ? When you play Civ and choose to play as for example the Russians, are you not role-playing a sheep ?

Sorry, massively off-topic already :)

Was it necessary for a thread like this to be politicised? Every major event isn't always circling around politics, you know. Except eurovision, I would say, where there are votes. In sports there are no votes. With the use of VAR (for football), the best, or luckiest, wins.

Sorry, I am definitely guilty as charged ! Really looking forward to the tournament personally. I love both games and football because they are escapisms.

I am hoping to cure you all, and see the error in your ways! Come my children, follow my lead. I will show you the way to the enlightenmen, salvation and free beer.

Alternatively, Finns are shit at soccer, and you decided to take a cheap shot at Greta :)

I follow sports, but hardly never live. Anyway, I always like to cheer for the underdogs.

Opening matches can be weird, and the teams that fancy their chances tend to take it slowly, so from that point of view a surprise result wouldn't be impossible this evening, but the difference in value between Germany and Scotland makes me say that a surprise result would be a somewhat tighter win for Germany, not anything else.

As for favorites, yeah, France and Portugal.

I do say that the championship has grown too much though, both the Euro and the World Cup. 24 teams here, and will have 48 there? Come on.

"Smart money" isn't betting at all. They *run* the whole betting business as book-makers.

Across Europe, in 24 countries, fans bet on their national team.

Fans: 1 Team wins, 23 lose.
Book-makers: 1 loss, 23 wins.

^^ That's a really smart way to earn money.

Another mindset is to specifically bet against the team you support. If they lose, at least you win money.

It was a turn of phrase :) For single events for soccer, bookmakers usually always win because they make the margins so steep.

Then again I once bet on Greece to win the Euros at 50/1 after they beat Portugal in their first group match.

I lost my nerve and cashed out just before the final but it was a good lesson that sometimes there is "money" or whatever to be made from not following the status quo.

My point was that Germany will do well to win tonight.

Couldn't care less about the tournament, only thing I wonder about is whether there'll be terror attacks. I suppose the large-scale ones like in Paris or recently in Moscow are difficult to pull off, so maybe not that likely, but one can't say the same about stabbing attacks.

A seal in my local zoo predicted a 1-1.

Personally I think Germany is going to win 2-0.

Hopefully not but with some fans would you even be able to tell the difference between terror attacks and ultras?

It's a really tense time at the moment now though so if anyone is going to matches maybe arrive well ahead of time to be safe :\

Hooligans are much less of an issue than they were in the 1980s or 1990s.
Btw, I agree with you about the degenerate "sex with my aunt" game, shameful Gog is selling that. Don't let yourself be discouraged by all the people defending that stuff.