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Last week, plans were announced that the 2020 European Football Championships would he held in 13 Cities across Europe, instead of the traditional choice of single countries or pairs of neighbouring countries.
The concept is backed by FIFA Vice President Michel Platini as a way to ease the burden of the financial strain that hosting world sports events brings to a country and to provide the opportunity for smaller countries to become involved in the hosting process.
There is no doubt that hosting major sports events is a financial risk, according to Forbes, the cost of London 2012 was around $15 BILLION and the cost of preparing Ukraine and Poland for co-hosting Euro 2012 came to a staggering figure of around €20 BILLION.
This was spent on the development of stadia and building appropriate infrastructure to accommodate around 1 million people over summer.
You may wonder…why bother?
Increasing the number of tourists is high on most bidders agendas, as they are set to cash in on sold out venues and ticket sales.
So UEFA should recoop their losses from ticket sales?
Usually, they only account towards 16% of revenue but the importance of creating an atmosphere and selling out stadiums affects merchandise sales and whether people will watch. Consequently, playing a big role in determining the success of the event.
However, FSE (Football Supporters Europe) conducted a survey and found 82% of fans do not support UEFA`s plan for 2020.
Michel Platini: He just won’t listen!
Immediately, I question the support we will see in stadiums and what the atmosphere will be like.
Remember there will be no home support in this type of format and if it were to continue that way we would never see the likes of smaller countries overachieving with the support of a home crowd, take Portugal and Sweden in 2004 and 1992 respectively as examples.
Sponsors are bound to pay big money for the chance to expose themselves across Europe which is another potential deciding factor in UEFA`s plans to experiment with this format and see how much they can squeeze out of the likes of Adidas and Carlsberg.
Media rights and Broadcasting make up to 62% of the revenue generated and to put into perspective how much is made…Euro Championship football revenue has increased from €41 million in 1992 to $1.3 BILLION in 2012.
But who is going to watch a game with no atmosphere and increasingly poor performances?
All these problems stem from one issue, travelling.
Starting with fans, who can afford to travel across Europe and arrange travel, accommodation, tickets, merchandise and more to make up the number of attendees?
This makes the championship inaccessible for those on average salaries and rules out supporters who make a weeks holiday of attending the Euros in previous championships.
I predict UEFA will charge incredibly high ticket prices and take the chance on making their money back from the rich despite lower attendances, rather than selling out stadiums.
Or tickets will be mostly corporate and only limited tickets will be available to the public, creating an optical illusion of interest…similar to what was seen at London 2012.
Moving onto the players, who can expect performance levels to match those of previous championships?
Players will be travelling thousands of miles further, have less practice time and be more vulnerable to fatigue.
As I mentioned earlier, expect performances to worsen as the tournament progresses, unless coaches choose to rotate players.
This will result in either watching unknown reserves or poor first team performances later in the competition.
Both equally unwanted outcomes.
And not something problematic in previous championships…
This outlines the power of money in the footballing world and utter disregard for the good of the game on behalf of UEFA.
The game has a bad reputation when it comes to corruption and to illustrate my point Michel Platini voted for oil-rich Dubai to host the 2022 Football World Cup and of course…they won.
Several weeks later, Laurent Platini (son of Michel) was hired by Qatar Sports Investment as their European Chief.
Qatar Sports Investment are owned by the Quatari royal family who of course wanted to bring the World Cup to Dubai.
They got what they wanted and i’m sure Michel did too!
Jake Oxby – Sports Business Management Student (Carnegie)
Sports Business Management 