So, it’s over then, the worst of the 15 European Championships to date, a tournament so bereft of quality that Wales’s mildly diverting win over an inept Belgium was raised to the status of minor classic. Of 51 games, perhaps one, France’s victory over Germany, will be remembered by neutrals – and it, in truth, was utterly unrepresentative of the rest of the tournament.

Many have questioned whether Portugal were worthy winners but in a sense they are the most worthy of winners: no champion ever, perhaps, has been so representative of the ethos of a tournament. Two forwards left to their own devices in advance of an eight-man citadel that conceded one goal in 420 knockout minutes and won only one game in normal time in the entire tournament: this is modern international football.

Yes, there were rousing performances from a handful of minnows, and the people of Iceland and Wales will rightly remember France 2016 with fondness. But this felt like another staging post in the death of international football being regarded as in any way elite. Still, hurrah for the underdog!

Although really, this was only David against Goliath if Goliath had turned up knackered from a long season of lucrative fighting for Gath United in the Philistine Premier League wondering what he was doing there when the quality and financial rewards of the club game were so much greater.

The question of what we’ve learned tactically from the tournament is always asked, but this is not 1958, with a back four bursting forth to change the world. It’s not even 1974 and the Netherlands confirming the efficacy of the Total Football of Ajax and Feyenoord. It’s not even 1986 and the wonderment of the back three. Euro 2016’s relation to the club game was indirect and perhaps more psychological than tactical.

Along came Barcelona under Pep Guardiola, tiki-takaing their way to possession stats that frequently hit 70% or more. At first everybody panicked and tried to work out ways of getting the ball off them, and then, in the wake of Internazionale’s success in the 2010 Champions League semi-final it was recognised that the way to beat them was to let them have the ball. So José Mourinho’s radical non-possession challenged Barça’s radical possession and a new paradigm emerged.

Mario Gómez, far left, celebrates scoring for Germany against a Northern Ireland team that defended very deep and in great numbers. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

Teams at this tournament have been eager to take on the reactive role. Many games have seemed almost a battle not to take the initiative, a slow bicycle race of non-possession. Games of cut-and-thrust, of two teams actually going at each other – which is what makes for the most thrilling spectacle – have been rare almost to the point of nonexistent, a situation exacerbated by the glut of moderate teams, the height of whose ambition is to pack eight men behind the ball.

Stats are slippery beasts but, as a rough indication of that, 49% of games in this tournament featured one side having 60% possession or more, as opposed to 37% of games in last season’s Premier League. Half of games, in other words, were essentially attack against defence.

That’s not necessarily a problem – Germany had 66.8% possession against France – and if the reactive side has a clear idea of how to attack, as France did in Marseille, a disparity in possession can still produce stirring football. But when a team essentially sets itself up as a punchbag, the results are rarely worth watching.

This is also the FA Cup’s dirty secret: people don’t watch the early rounds because they’re not very good. The shocks that are its lifeblood are, by definition, rare even with Premier League sides often playing weakened sides, and the games that aren’t shocks are often stultifying. But at international level it’s worse because attacks aren’t as well-drilled as they are at club level, the lack of time making it impossible to generate the slickness of thought and the mutual understanding that would help a side cut through a massed rearguard. Germany were able to do it against Slovakia because they have a creative core – Toni Kroos, Thomas Müller and Mesut Özil – who have played together for years. But they are a rarity.

This will be taken as elitism. It is not. Everybody has a chance to qualify for the Euros. The smaller sides who made an impact – Wales, Iceland, even Northern Ireland – would have qualified for a 16-team tournament because they were good enough. Take France plus the best 15 teams from qualifying (allowing for a couple of sides easing off having already secured their place in the finals) and the only differences to the last 16 that did emerge are swapping Hungary and Ireland for Austria and the Czech Republic: 36 games, most of them dull, over a two-week period for that.

This will be taken as complaining at teams defending. It is not. Weaker teams should defend, they must defend. Their obligation is to get the best result possible, or it is no longer a sport. That can be uplifting, but when attacks are poor it tends to be dull.

Instead, this is a lament for the best of the international tournaments, three-and-a-half weeks of sustained quality and interest destroyed by greed, political expediency and the woolly-minded give-everybody-a-go mentality that breeds mediocrity. Just because Euro 2012 was also a disappointing tournament doesn’t change that: the previous three Euros were all excellent. International football is drowning in the dilution of quality.

Euro 2016, perhaps, will be remembered as the first homeopathic tournament.