Poland and Ukraine Successful Bid
Joint Hosts for 2012 UEFA European Championships
UEFA announced that Poland and Ukraine would be joint hosts of the European football Championships in 2012.
UEFA President, Michael Platini, announced that Poland and Ukraine would host the European Football Championships in 2012.
The last former Eastern bloc country to host these championships was Yugoslavia in 1976. There will be 16 countries taking part in the tournament and the organisers are planning to use stadia in six Polish cities – Chorzow, Gdansk, Krakow, Poznan, Warsaw and Wroclaw and in four Ukrainian cities – Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Lviv and Kiev. The final will probably be played in the Olympic Stadium in Kiev.
The selection of Poland and Ukraine as joint hosts for the tournament is in line with UEFA’s policy of involving smaller nations in such important competitions, rather than constantly returning to the larger nations. Italy have already hosted the tournament on two occasions while neither Poland nor Ukraine have been involved in such a tournament. However, the bid by Poland and Ukraine was still considered to be the outsider of the three but they were supported in their bid by two footballers currently playing in the Premiership in England – Poland’s Liverpool goalkeeper Jerzy Dudek and Ukraine's Andriy Shevchenko the Chelsea striker.
The decision was greeted with great enthusiasm and joy in both Poland and Ukraine who will be working together to organise the tournament.
The other countries who had applied to hold the tournament were Italy and Croatia and Hungary. The big losers this time were Italy whose bid was expected to win through but was overlooked by the organising committee. The recent difficulties experienced by the Italian football authorities would not have helped their cause and would certainly have worked against them.
While Italy won the FIFA World Cup in Germany last summer, the feel-good factor from that win was greatly soured by the allegations of corruption in their League football with a number of their top clubs being punished for their misdemeanours. Those problems were added to with the crowd trouble within Italian football which saw a police officer killed in the trouble in Sardinia and then the recent crowd problems in Rome during the Champions League game between Roma and Manchester United. These difficulties came at a bad time for the Italian authorities who were making the bid for the European Championships.
The first European Championships were held in France in 1960 when USSR were the winners. The last tournament was played in Portugal in 2004 when Greece were the unexpected winners defeating the host nation in the Final. The twelve tournament have produced nine different winners – Germany have been victorious on three occasions, France twice while Denmark, Netherlands, Czechoslavakia, Italy and Spain have also won it once.
The European teams are currently in the middle of qualification matches to secure places at next year’s tournament which is being held in Austria and Switzerland.
