Who will succeed Germany as host of Euro 2024 football? On Tuesday, UEFA is expected to award the 2028 edition to the United Kingdom and Ireland, and that of 2032 to the more experimental team formed by Italy and Turkey.
As with each designation, the executive of the European body will meet behind closed doors at the organization’s headquarters, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Nyon (Switzerland), before a double decision and a brief ceremony expected at midday. -daytime.
But the delegations can arrive calmly, since they are the only ones in the running, confirmation of a double trend around major sporting events: the scarcity of applications in the face of the required investments and the grouping between interested countries after long negotiations behind the scenes, killing everything final suspense.
The best illustration is the unprecedented agreement announced by the International Federation (Fifa) last Wednesday for the 2030 World Cup, with a joint Morocco-Portugal-Spain organization also providing for the first three matches in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay – initially candidates for the sides of Chile.
The five federations of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland) were also vying for the 2030 World Cup, after England’s unsuccessful attempts to organize those of 2006 and 2018.
But, at the start of 2022, they chose to focus on the 2028 edition of the Euro, “the third largest sporting event in the world”, which “offers a similar return on investment” to the World Cup with “a delivery cost well inferior,” they explained.
Because, if the race for the gigantism of the World Cup is in full swing, going from 32 to 48 teams for 104 matches from 2026, the European Championship retains 24 teams (since 2016), for 51 matches spread over ten stadiums.
Already huge favorites for the award, the United Kingdom and Ireland no longer even have rivals since Turkey, an unsuccessful candidate in each edition since 2008, threw in the towel for 2028 by betting everything on a common ticket with Italy in 2032, announced in July.
Russia almost played spoilsport by declaring its interest in the two Euros in March 2022, just a few days after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, but its candidacies were quickly deemed inadmissible by UEFA.
Thirty-two years after Euro 1996 in England, seven years after Euro-2020 scattered across the continent but concentrated at London’s Wembley Stadium from the semi-finals, the competition will therefore return to British soil.
The prospect raises little criticism as the future organizers, ultra-familiar with European meetings thanks to the sporting hegemony of the Premier League, seem “capable of hosting in the best conditions”, notes Ronan Evain, executive director of the association Football Supporters Europe.
Italy and Turkey, by choosing to join forces this summer, also seem certain to be designated, even if UEFA will have to modify its regulations – which still reserved the joint organization of final phases “for neighboring countries” at the end of 2021. .
Their team nevertheless raises more questions: “forcing supporters to go back and forth between the two countries is not ideal”, underlines Ronan Evain, a question already illustrated by the Euro in 2021 and which will also arise for the players .
Furthermore, if Italy has already organized the Euro in 1968 and 1980, the travel bans recently taken in Rome for European competitions worry foreign fans, as do “the organizational difficulties in Istanbul during the 2019 Super Cup », where non-English speaking police officers had replaced the stewards planned for the searches less than two hours before the match, confiscating scarves and flags in a certain confusion, recalls the supporters’ representative.
“Distributing the load of an organization makes sense, especially in a context where local populations expect a reduction in the impact of major competitions. But we need geographical coherence,” summarizes Ronan Evain, who also calls on UEFA to look more clearly at “the question of human rights and police culture” in the choice of organizing countries.
