June 2012 is a football month. At least European continent will be watching and talking about football. Even people who are not much excited about the EURO’12 unwillingly witness exalted crowd dressed and coloured in different national t-shirts/colours. or might be facing annoying comments/posts through social networks and traditional media outlets. Anyways, this is something that cannot be easily avoided. :)
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| Warsaw. Poland |
Many friends of
mine in Warsaw are not necessarily happy about being part of it, some try to
escape from the championship to different cities and those who stay complain
about football hysteria in the country/host cities. In fact, once you enter the
capital of Poland, you realize that football pretty much took over everything,
TV, Radio, Internet, ads which are literally everywhere starting from transport
to skyscrapers. in addition to the
overly football atmosphere, both countries Poland and Ukraine had quite high
expenditure on the tournament. Infrastructure has been modernized, new
highways, airport terminals, trains, additional means of transportation, metro
and other urban changes, which have been going on for quite a while already.
This is obviously not a full list of things happening for this one particular
event, but most importantly as EURO’12 is a football championship, eight
different stadiums have been built. Some completely new, some have been
reconstructed entirely.. yep both countries are not the top football nations in
Europe, thus most of the things have been done almost from nothing.
Certainly nobody
has an expectation that Euro’12 will be the best organised event in the
history, but in terms of developing football and triggering number of changes
in these countries is something that UEFA can be proud of. Those stadiums and
infrastructure will not disappear as Euro’12 ends. It will pay off in the end,
and both countries have an excellent opportunity to attract quite a number of
tourists and promote their countries all over the world.
On this note, I
have to express my scepticism about the Georgian bid for hosting European
Championship in 2020. Witnessing how Poland and Ukraine are dealing with
things, it will be extremely hard, not if impossible to host such a massive
event. Not to mention financial aspect (obviously not funded by UEFA), there
are so many things need to be considered.. also number of countries for the
European Championship will increase for the next tournaments, which means that
more stadiums are needed, more resources and despite the fact that I do think
those kind of events have great influence on countries development, I highly
doubt that even theoretically Georgia can handle such a big event. In any case
looking forward to the panel decision for the Euro 2020.
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