Euro 2024/ Boondoggle

Boondoggle- a wasteful or impractical project

Ex: The formation of a Transylvanian football team was labelled as boondoggle by the Transylvanian government after it was discovered that they had no ulterior motives other than to just play football at the 2024 European Championship.

Count Orlok, the Minister of Sport, was shocked to find out that the team, which had beat the long odds to qualify for the prestigious tournament, was neither attempting to suck the blood of mortals on the pitch, Luis Suarez style, or back in the team hotels in Frankfurt. The team’s first group stage match, a triumphant and quite remarkable 2-1 come from behind victory against tournament favorites Spain, was seen as a catastrophic failure. Despite the improbable result, central midfielder Vlad “Succubus” Viracik had miscarried the tactics laid out for him by the team’s coach, Nosferatu, who had specifically told Viracik to harvest four pints of Lamine Yamal’s youthful blood in order to ensure long life and vitality for him and his band of fanged teammates.

Despite being viewed as an embarrassing defeat by the Transylvanian authorities, the result of the match was the talk of the football tournament. Fox sports pundit Daniel Sturridge commented that he was, “beside himself”, that he had, “never witnessed anything like this in his career, both as a footballer and as an analyst”, and that, “to achieve the result they did, wearing capes, mind you, speaks to the monumental job done by the coaching staff and the Transylvanian Football Association as a whole”.

Just this morning, in a stunning turn of events, coach Nosferatu informed members of the media that the team would be withdrawing from the tournament, as the two remaining group stage matches, more evenly propped up games against Serbia and Albania, were scheduled to be played during daylight hours, and his players would, “succumb to the sun’s powerful ultraviolet rays and surely melt, were they to play”. The forecast for those two games in Cologne and Hamburg is a balmy 72 degrees Fahrenheit, so we are still working around the clock to get more information about what was meant exactly by those comments.