If you want to see a pattern of failure, look no further than the following sequence of numbers - 1960, 1964, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1984, 1994, 2008.
Those are the major tournaments my native England have failed to qualify for in the last 60 years. That's one-third of the tournaments missed in that time, from the nation that invented the game. But failure can breed success. England's golden generation came after failing to make the '94 World Cup, and 2008's failure led to the St. George's Park national training center. The Germans overhauled their youth system after a woeful Euro 2000 in which they only scored one goal, and won the last World Cup as a result.