European soccer has some hard thinking to do. Its teams have been largely outplayed by their African and Latin American rivals in the two FIFA tournaments currently being played.

The semifinal stages of the Confederations Cup and the under-20 world youth championship told a humiliating tale: Among the eight teams involved, there was only one from Europe – Germany, the host team of the Confederations Cup. Nor did the Germans manage to advance any further, losing 3-2 to Brazil. The result ensured that tomorrow’s final would be an all South American affair, Argentina having beaten Mexico in the other (all Latin American) semifinal.

The picture is even gloomier for Europe in the youth championship, being played in the Netherlands. Today’s semifinals pit Nigeria vs. Morocco and – yet again – Argentina vs. Brazil.

What makes this rout particularly embarrassing for the Europeans is that both tournaments are being played in Europe. It is a long-accepted and statistically confirmed fact of soccer life that playing at home – on your own continent and preferably in your own country – confers a huge winning advantage. European teams have won eight of the nine World Cups staged in Europe; only Brazil, winner of the 1958 edition in Sweden, has broken that spell.

In 2003, Brazil won in Europe again, this time capturing the under-17 world championship in Finland. Three of the semifinalists in that tournament were South American – Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia – along with Spain, the most Latin-styled of the European countries. The triumph of Latin soccer was repeated later that year at the under-20 World Cup: exactly the same four semifinalists, and another win for Brazil.

The two tournaments contained a clear message: Not only were the European teams outplayed, they were in danger of being outclassed. Their results were bad, but more significantly, the quality of their soccer was poor. Only Spain fielded players with the ball technique to match the South Americans.

Did any of that get through to the coaches and administrators who run European soccer? I wonder. Europeans do not, on the whole, pay much attention to the under-17 tournament, while the under-20 event was played far away in the United Arab Emirates.

But the complacency resting on Europe’s almost inviolable home-field record will be severely jolted by the two current tournaments. Again, it is not just that the Europeans failed to get results – it is the demonstrably inferior quality of their soccer that should be sounding strident alarms.

In the Confederations Cup, Greece – the current European champion – was humiliated 3-0 by Brazil, lost 1-0 to Japan, and scraped out a 0-0 tie with Mexico. In terms of good soccer, the Greeks had nothing to offer.

Germany bumbled its way to a 4-3 win over Australia and dispatched Tunisia 3-0; the loss to Brazil followed a 2-2 tie with Argentina. The Germans unquestionably improved with each game, and coach Jurgen Klinsmann, who took over last year when German soccer was in the doldrums, has re-installed some of the old Ger man confidence.

Against Brazil, the Germans held their own, though it was the intensity of their physical commitment rather than their technical ability that impressed. In that sense, it is surely significant that the Germans were bigger (their average player was 6 feet 1 inch tall and 177 pounds, compared with the Brazilians’ 5-foot-11, 169-pound average).

Therein lies the traditional European counter to Latin (and increasingly, African) skill: a more physical game, plus the use of defensive tactics. The danger of that approach has always been that a reliance on those factors would eventually lead to atrophy of the skills. And the Europeans now seem to be reaching that point. The evidence lies in the sweeping culls that the top European clubs now make in South America and Africa to sign up young players; an ever-increasing proportion of the stars of Europe’s club teams are from those two continents.

The faltering caliber of European skill was also clear in the youth World Cup, where the host country, the Netherlands, was eliminated by Nigeria. The Dutch are justifiably considered among the more skill-oriented of the Europeans, yet the Nigerians showed, in every position on the field, a higher level of technique. The Dutch tactics – defensive, disciplined, and dull – took the game to penalty kicks before the Nigerians won out.

The Dutch performance was a frustrating one. One has come to expect livelier soccer from them, and their essentially cautious game revealed the self-limiting drawback of the European approach. A more attacking mentality would surely have paid dividends against the free-flowing but less tactically organized Nigerians. But the Dutch, the European masters of systematized and programmed soccer, stuck to their game plan and lost a game they might have won.

The attacking mentality isn’t mentioned much in Europe these days. While every coach will stoutly deny that his team is defensive, none of them – certainly not Otto Rehhagel, coach of Greece – could make the sort of claim that Brazil’s Carlos Alberto Parreira made before the game against Germany: “Brazil cannot try to be more physical than an opponent because it is not our style. We have a game based on short, fast passing, with players of great ability who have attacking instincts.”

Those few words cover the gulf between European and Latin soccer. Short passing inevitably means a game played primarily with the ball on the ground. This is fundamental, as it rewards ball technique, and works to negate any advantage given by size.

Happily, in the under-20 tournament, Argentina’s Lionel Messi is making an exuberant case for skill. At 5-foot-7 and 145 pounds, Messi is among the smallest players in the tournament, but he has been its most exciting and its most effective.

To watch Messi is to see the very best of soccer’s skills in action: the instant control of the ball, the sheer neatness of every touch, the ability to wrong-foot defenders with the slightest and subtlest of body movements, the almost unfair ability to make defense-splitting passes … and the ruthless goal-sense.

It was Messi’s goal – a ball won in midfield, a sprint forward, a defender beaten, the ball slammed violently past the goalkeeper, all Messi, no assists on this one – that rescued Argentina when it was struggling against Colombia. And it was Messi who scored what may yet be the goal of the tournament: a rapid sequence of deft touches to bamboozle the Spanish defenders crowding round him, followed by a perfectly angled shot just out of the goalkeeper’s reach.

Today, Messi faces his most difficult test against the Brazilians. One hopes that Messi will do his thing while the Brazilians will respond with their customary skills. If so, the Europeans watching on the sidelines should see the game as an object lesson in just how far behind their game has fallen.