Considering they have a common 450km-long border and have together been the beating heart of the European project for nearly 60 years, France and Germany are remarkably dissimilar.
Not so their football teams, which clash in Rio on Friday in what promises to be a fascinating World Cup quarter-final.
Take the goalkeepers: Hugo Lloris and Manuel Neuer don’t exactly look alike; but they are very proactive exponents of their craft, among the quickest to sprint off their lines to snuff out trouble. Germany’s Round of 16 clash against Algeria showed this trait to good effect, with Neuer racing repeatedly out of the penalty area to clear balls off the toes of pacey Algerian forwards exploiting the lack of speed in the German rearguard.
Both teams also have well-balanced, imaginative, disciplined midfields that probably constitute their greatest strength. The French combination looks hungrier, faster, perhaps even stronger, with Mathieu Valbuena, in his prime, seeming to combine many of the qualities of Alain Giresse and Luis Fernández, half of the famous 1980s “carré magique”.
The German unit though has now played together long enough to know instinctively where team-mates will be in almost every situation. One distinct positive from the tougher-than-expected Algeria match, particularly for a quarter-final in which fulcrum Philipp Lahm may have to revert to full-back, was that Sami Khedira, who came on as a second-half substitute, appeared much more his old self.
The teams also share the characteristic of using unorthodox lead strikers – Thomas Műller and Karim Benzema – who are bang in form, even if the flow of goals has slowed since they notched five between them in their opening Brazil 2014 games.
And if both sides have a weakness, it is at full-back.
There are plenty of differences too: if Műller and Benzema lend a whiff of the unexpected to both attacks, they are not remotely similar players. And Real Madrid’s Raphael Varane gives this French side the sort of pace at the back that their rivals lack. But I cannot remember ever before being more struck by the similarities between competing French and German sides than their differences.
Certainly, in the 1980s, when Michel Platini was in his pomp, it was all French flair against West German (as it was then) efficiency.
The two teams clashed twice in World Cups in that decade, in consecutive semi-finals. One of those games, in 1982, is vividly remembered to this day because of the Patrick Battiston incident; the other, from 1986, much less so. But the fact is it was the Germans who won both times.
By 1998, when the tournament was in France, the hosts had profited by harnessing talent from all corners of the country’s increasingly multiethnic society, in a pattern we see replicated ever more often in international football today.
French football leaders had also had to cope with a situation in which the vast majority of top French players played their club football abroad.
The potentially debilitating effects of this diaspora were successfully countered, in part, through the development of Clairefontaine, outside Paris, which had opened in 1988, as a strong national football centre.
In both of these characteristics, France differed from the German side of the time, which was not multiethnic and was largely, though not exclusively, German-based.
The two teams seemed destined to meet again in the semi-finals, until that is the astonishing Croatians hammered Jűrgen Klinsmann and his team-mates 3-0 in Lyons, in an early symptom of the decline that was soon to set in.
By 2010, the young German team that took the first African World Cup by storm was as diverse as many other European teams, while the vigorous good health of the Bundesliga, and Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund in particular, have helped to keep the nucleus of the squad in Germany, albeit with outposts at the likes of Arsenal and Real Madrid.
That, of course, was a tournament that the French would rather forget; they have yet to replicate their neighbour’s impressive World Cup consistency.
Friday’s match could be a classic, with the Germans, forced to spend so long in the shadow of an at their best almost unplayable Spanish side, now obliged to fight off the new challenge of France, cast in the role of young pretenders, having almost blown their World Cup qualification campaign, but with a European Championship that they will host in two years’ time to look forward to.
Equally, it could be the sort of contest in which evenly-matched rivals largely cancel each other out.
Either way, I wonder if the similarity of the templates on which the two football teams are now constructed will turn out to be a precursor to the two countries – France, the arch-centralisers, and Germany, the arch-federalists – finally becoming more similar too.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.