PARIS: Euro 2020 finally gets underway, a year late, next week with the European Championship being staged as a pan-continental event for the first time.
Matches will be played in 11 cities spread all across Europe, a set-up that is almost certain never to be repeated and was originally the idea of Michel Platini.
- Platini's 'plan' -
It was in June 2012, just as Spain was winning that year's European Championship in Kiev, that Platini -- then the president of UEFA -- revealed the idea of staging the 2020 tournament in "12 or 13 host cities".
It was seen as a way of bringing the competition to a wide range of countries while avoiding having to build new stadiums or other infrastructure in one place after the complications of staging Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine.
Platini also saw it as a way to mark the 60th anniversary of the first staging of what was then the European Nations Cup, as a four-team competition in 1960.
The Euro has grown since then, expanding to eight teams, then to 16, and then to 24 for the last tournament in France in 2016.
"It is perhaps a bit of a zany idea but it is a good idea," Platini insisted in December 2012.
In 2014, a total of 13 host cities were named by UEFA, with London awarded both semi-finals and the final.
- The troubles begin -
Platini claimed that a pan-European event would mean fewer potential problems in terms of stadium-building. However, in late 2017 Brussels -- initially awarded four matches -- was removed from the list of host cities due to the inability of Belgian organisers to guarantee the planned new stadium could be built in time.
When he initially floated the idea publicly, Platini had also claimed that "in these days of cheap air travel anything is possible."
However, the growing climate crisis led to more and more voices speaking out against the carbon footprint caused by staging a European Championship in so many far-flung destinations.
Meanwhile Platini fell from grace in 2015 in the corruption scandal that took down FIFA president Sepp Blatter and led to the Frenchman being handed a long-term ban from working in the game.
- Postponement and complications -
Platini's successor, Aleksander Ceferin, was left to deal with the organisation of the continent-wide tournament and UEFA was forced into the historic decision in March last year to postpone the finals just three months before their scheduled start due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ceferin later admitted the idea of a European Championship in stadiums spread across the continent was "symbolically a nice thing, but not an easy task for us, even regardless of the pandemic."
UEFA put back the tournament by a year but said it would still officially be called Euro 2020.
However organisers had to accept the impossibility of playing matches in front of full stadiums and ended up dropping two more host cities which were unable to guarantee that any fans could attend.
Dublin and Bilbao, both due to host four games, were dropped in April. Seville was named as a replacement for the latter.
The number of host cities was therefore further reduced to 11, while Dublin's games were given to London and Saint-Petersburg.
At least the Euro is happening, contrary to what many observers feared a year ago. But the pan-European experiment will not be repeated for the next edition, with Germany already named as host for Euro 2024.