Euro press reaction to England-France, Morocco-Portugal games

Moroccan mastery, English penalty pain, Ronaldo’s ruin, and French flair all featured in the final quarterfinals of a 2022 World Cup that continues to deliver gargantuan games.

Here’s a look at how newspapers at home and abroad reacted to the action.

The English Exit

First, we look back at The Sun’s bizarre cover from before the match. It doesn’t even look like “eggy bread” as the breakfast treat is also known by over there:

Then we get into coverage of yet another English exit caused, in part, by a penalty kick.

La Joie de la France

France’s daily sports paper, L’Equipe (a concept that failed in the United States even back when Americans actually read newspapers) delivers the perfect summary of what was a tense and taut affair:

La Dépêche goes a little more high-brow for its headline, while the tease up top is a reminder that rugby has a claim to be France’s most beloved sport as well:

L’Yonne Républicaine thinks that match had the “scent of a final,” and it did have that decisive feeling:

Sud Ouest expressed similar sentiments in calling it a “massive” quarterfinal:

Portuguese Pain

A Bola sums up the national mood best with “Cry, Portugal”:

O Jogo says that Portugal were “thrown to the carpet”:

“Sad End” sounds a little more poetic as “Triste Fim” in Portuguese:

Moroccan Coverage

Hespress features scenes of jubilation from throughout the Arab world:

Al Alam delivers a powerful headline, “Morocco Writes a Historical Epic that Paralyzed the Tongues of the World”

Morocco’s French-language paper, Le Matin, offers the words from Morocco’s magnificent manager Walid Regragui: “our qualification is not a miracle, it is the result of teamwork.”

Coverage from the Rest of the World

Canada’s leading French-language daily, Le Journal de Montréal, says “the Moroccan Fairy Tale Continues”:

Italy’s Corriere dello Sport leads with “The First Time” then says that Morocco has ended Ronaldo’s era:

Spain’s Marca says that Morocco is the “Star of the World Cup”:

Morocco’s win even made some front pages in the United States, as we see with Los Angeles’ La Opinión, the New York Times, and the Washington Post: