Euro 2024's biggest winners and losers: From Lamine Yamal and Georgia's heroes to Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappe's misery

Lamine Yamal turned 17 on Saturday. On Sunday evening, he celebrated by helping Spain win the European Championship. "It's the best birthday present ever," the winger said after being named the Young Player of the Tournament and then lifting the Henri Delaunay trophy.

"Lamine is incredible," team-mate Nico Williams enthused. "The sky's the limit for him." And really it is. Much as we don't want to burden this extraordinary young man with any more pressure, we really are talking Pele potential here; that's just undeniable at this stage.

He's the youngest player to ever appear in a Euros or World Cup final and the goal he created for Williams saw him end the tournament with four assists - twice as many as any other player, which is just ridiculous.

A lot of the game's biggest names underwhelmed in Germany, but Yamal surpassed all expectations. Football has a new star.

Gareth Southgate is a nice guy. He's incredibly popular with his players and the English press. Statistically speaking, he's also one of the most successful managers in his country's history. However, he's not won a major trophy with the Three Lions - and he never will. He's just not brave enough.

Was he let down by certain supposed stars in Germany? Definitely. Were injuries and fatigue factors in England's poor performances? Unquestionably. But the brutal reality is that Southgate once again failed to get the most out of the talent at his disposal because of his characteristic conservatism.

England arrived in Germany with as good a group of players as anyone else, but their tactics and style of play were absolutely atrocious. Had it not been for a staggeringly favourable draw and moments of magic from certain individuals (which only emphasised the quality of the squad), they wouldn't have made it past the last 16.

Basically, England had the players to win Euro 2024 - but not the manager. Southgate did a good job lifting the spirits of a nation after the mediocrity of Roy Hodgson's reign and Sam Allardyce's embarrassingly short tenure - but it's been clear since the final of Euro 2020 that his pragmatism is preventing his players from realising their full potential.

If Southgate and England don't part ways in the coming days, the fans need to start bracing themselves for at least another two years of hurt.

The Harry Kane curse continues. One the finest forwards of the modern era remains trophy-less. This latest failure will be particularly tough for Kane to take, given he was abysmal in England's loss to Spain in Berlin and rightly withdrawn after just an hour of play.

It's clear that Kane was slightly hindered by the injury that saw him miss the tail end of Bayern Munich's season, but that doesn't really explain why the 30-year-old performed quite so poorly in Germany. He was still fit enough to start all seven of England's games - even though the calls for the captain to be dropped started long before the final.

Kane's quality obviously can't be questioned, but despite scoring three goals and leading his country to the final, this tournament has been one long struggle for the striker. It was, as he admitted in Berlin, "as painful as it gets", meaning it's going to take him an awfully long time to get over the most devastating defeat of a career now infamous for its total lack of team success.

It was rather hard to work out who was managing Portugal in Germany. Was it coach Roberto Martinez? Or captain Cristiano Ronaldo? Maybe it was a combination of the two.

All we know for sure is that the pair were in total agreement on one thing: that Ronaldo should start each and every game no matter how detrimental his inclusion was to the team.

Unsurprisingly, basing the entire game plan around a 39-year-old striker backfired spectacularly. Ronaldo failed to score a single goal in Germany despite playing more minutes than any other outfield player in the Portugal squad - which is the most damning indictment of Martinez's embarrassingly weak management of the biggest ego in football.

Ronaldo obviously deserves a big send-off in front of his own fans, given everything he's done for his country over the years. But Euro 2024 made it shockingly clear that neither he nor Martinez should be anywhere near this gifted group of Portugal players by the time the 2026 World Cup rolls around.

Spain may have needed an 86th-minute winner from Mikel Oyarzabal to win the Euros, but there was nothing fortunate about their tournament triumph.

As Rodri said, "We have made history, beating four former world champions in the process. We got through the toughest draw and it speaks for the mentality of the team. This has been cultivated. Many of us were champions at Under-17, Under-19, Under-21 level ... De la Fuente knew what he was doing."

No arguments there. Luis de la Fuente's historic hat-trick of Euros titles is testament to not only a great panel of players and some impressive foresight from the Spanish Football Association (RFEF) - but also his coaching credentials.

Spain's game may still be based on dominating possession, but they didn't play boring tiki-taka in Germany. They were devastatingly direct at the times, in order to make full use of the pace and trickery of Nico Williams and Yamal. They also demonstrated impressive resilience at times - they lost two of the best players in the world to injury and still managed to beat first Germany, and then England - meaning enormous credit must go to the manager for creating such a strong and united group.

Most of all, though, De la Fuente deserves all the praise in the world for being brave. Unlike teams such as France and England, his Spain side were never anything but positive, so it was both a joy and a relief to see an offensively-minded coach rewarded for taking risks.

Kylian Mbappe offered a brutally honest appraisal of his Euro 2024 campaign after France's semi-final loss to Spain: "It was a failure." There were obviously mitigating factors.

A broken nose suffered in the closing stages of the matchday-one win over Austria forced him to wear a mask he absolutely hated, while Didier Deschamps' dreadfully negative tactics arguably proved even more restrictive.

However, there's no getting away from the fact that Mbappe performed poorly in Germany. Chances to score may have been few and far between, but when they did arrive, Mbappe wasted them. His leadership skills also came under intense scrutiny, with former France midfielder calling Mbappe "an unworthy captain" for the way in which he allegedly throws team-mates under the bus.

So, while this year's Euros may not have been quite as traumatic as the previous edition - after which Mbappe even talked about quitting international football - it has raised further questions over the forward's character.

Austria's Euros campaign ended in bitter frustration, with Ralf Rangick's side deservedly topping a group containing France, Netherlands and Poland, only to lose 2-1 to Turkey in the last 16. They were essentially eliminated for failing to defend a couple of corners.

"I cannot believe that we're going home," Rangnick said after the loss in Leipzig. "We thought that we would continue our journey here." He also lamented the fact that Mert Gunok had chanelled the spirit of Gordon Banks to deny Christoph Baumgartner a deserved injury-time equaliser.

However, Austria's exit wasn't just devastating for Ragnick and his players, it was also a serious setback for the tournament. "I've seen other games when it was difficult to even stay awake," Rangnick admitted, "but that was not the case in our games." No arguments there.

While France went further playing a dreadful brand of football, Austria could at least bow out with their heads held high after entertaining everyone with their "courageous" and "energetic" style of play. Indeed, it was hard not to be feel that maybe Manchester United got rid of Rangick a little too soon...

Italy went into the Euros as the reigning champions and coming off the back of a couple of successful seasons for Serie A sides in continental competition. However, even before their campaign kicked off, there were fears that we were about to witness the worst title defence since Greece - and so it proved.

Italy may have made the last 16 - thanks to a 98th-minute equaliser against Croatia - but many of their fans ended up wishing they had not. Whatever about being given the runaround by Spain in the group stage, the way in which the Azzurri were swept aside by Switzerland hammered home the fact that there is something very wrong with Italian football right now, with Granit Xhaka claiming that the Swiss knew they'd win before they even set foot on the pitch because of the fear in their opponents' eyes, while Italy's minister of sport Andrea Abodi called the shockingly tame 2-0 defeat "a moral surrender".

There were mitigating factors in their failure in Germany, of course. Coach Luciano Spalletti had very little time to work with the team, having been parachuted into the job after Roberto Mancini's shock resignation last year, while the former Napoli boss also made quite the mess with his constant changes in formation and personnel.

However, it must also be acknowledged that there was a disturbing dearth of top-quality players for Spalletti to choose from - something that was flagged by Carlo Ancelotti before the Euros when he pointed out that Gigi Donnarumma was arguably the country's only proven world-class performer.

Consequently, the Azzurri's embarrassing elimination has sparked a national debate over the entire structure of Italian football that needs to actually lead to answers this time if Italy are to avoid missing out on qualifying for the World Cup for the third time in a row.

Domenico Tedesco's Belgium arrived in Germany unbeaten under their relatively new coach. They left utterly broken, after a calamitous campaign in which Kevin De Bruyne instructed his team-mates to turn their back on their own fans after they booed the Red Devils for showing a shocking lack of ambition in their final group game, against Ukraine.

It was an appropriately self-destructive demise for Belgium's much-vaunted 'Golden Generation', who promised so much but achieved so little, not least because of their inability to remain united when it mattered most.

In fairness to the infuriatingly divisive De Bruyne, he was probably right that Belgium's best chance to win a major trophy probably passed them by in Russia in 2018 - but that's still no excuse for such a talented group of players suffering an embarrassing first-round exit at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar before submitting in shamefully meek fashion to a feeble French team in the last 16 of the Euros.

The one positive is that De Bruyne is now likely to retire from international duty, along with big-game bottler Romelu Lukaku, offering Belgium a chance to build a new team, one unburdened by 'The Golden Generation' tag that proved too heavy a weight for the nation's best ever group of players to bear.

Toni Kroos has always had his critics. He's a player and a person that divides opinions. Even in his final appearance as a professional, in the epic Euro 2024 quarter-final clash with Spain, he upset people by taking Pedri out of the game - and indeed the tournament - with a tackle that somehow wasn't punished with a yellow card.

However, if there's one thing that we can all agree on when it comes to Kroos is that he realised his objective of calling time on his career while still performing at the peak of his powers. Indeed, his final season was unquestionably one of his greatest, with the midfielder playing a pivotal role in Real Madrid's Liga and Champions League double before fully vindicating his decision to come out of international retirement to represent his country at the Euros, where he was absolutely fantastic during Germany's run to the last eight before signing off in his own inimitable style.

"Thank you, football, you beautiful game," he wrote on social media. "And... you're welcome!"

It's impossible not to feel sorry for the Tartan Army. The best fans at the tournament had to follow the worst team. Indeed, 'Flower of Scotland' was the highlight of every game featuring Steve Clarke's dreadfully negative team that managed just 17 shots in total (the joint-fewest in the history of the group stage).

Not even in their final fixture against a desperately underwhelming Hungary - which they had to win to have any chance of reaching the last 16 of a major international tournament for the first time ever - did the Scots start attacking until 10 minutes to go. Worse still, for the second time in three games, they failed to even attempt a shot in the first half. To top it all off, Clarke launched a pathetic and offensive attack on the Argentine referee after the game.

Sadly, while Germany was a much poorer place without the Tartan Army, the tournament was all the richer for their team's early exit.

In the increasingly tribal and jingoistic world of football, it's hard to find players that are universally loved. Luka Modric is one such player, though.

After Croatia had been effectively eliminated by a last-gasp equaliser from Italy in their matchday-three meeting in Leipzig, an Italian journalist decided against asking Modric a question. He instead thanked the little magician for everything he had contributed to the beautiful game over the years and begged him never to retire. A visibly moved Modric said he would reluctantly have to hang up his boots eventually; he just wasn't sure when.

However, it's possible Leipzig was the last we'll see of Modric in the international arena. If it is, it was a terribly sad end. The image of the crestfallen Croatia captain holding aloft the Player of the Match award was almost haunting. But the tribute which followed in his post-match presser rather poignantly illustrated why Modric will be so sorely missed by every true football fan across the globe.

Nobody gave Georgia any real hope of reaching the knockout stage at Euro 2024. There were even understandable doubts over whether the tournament debutants would even pick up a point in Group F.

However, after spirited displays against both Turkey and the Czech Republic, Georgia stunned the world by upsetting Portugal in Gelsenkirchen to set up a last-16 showdown with Spain, against whom they even had the audacity to take the lead.

Willy Sagnol's side ultimately ended up on the wrong side of a 4-1 scoreline but they exited the tournament with their heads held high. Giorgi Mamardashvili was excellent in goal, Georges Mikautadze emerged as the unlikeliest of Golden Boot contenders, while Khvicha Kvaratskhelia showed why he's considered one of the world's most exciting wingers.

Before the Euros began, Georgia looked like its weakest team. As it turned out, they were actually one of the best to watch.

Ukraine's elimination was utterly heartbreaking. "It's unprecedented that a team with four points misses out on the knockout stage," an understandably emotional Oleksandr Tymchyk told UEFA. "We gave our all for our country. But we let them down."

Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course. Ukraine had done their war-ravaged country proud with their performances against both Belgium and Slovakia. Unfortunately, though, they were punished for one poor performance, against Romania on matchday one.

But as manager Serhiy Rebrov pointed out, "In the last two games, we showed the character of our nation. This is life, you make some mistakes, but then it’s important how you react. Of course, everyone is unhappy with the result, but there are no question marks over the players. We have a very young national team, and they are optimistic about the future."