Europe’s governing football body UEFA launches bidding process for 2028 Euro Cup hosts
According to the press office of Europe’s governing body of football, the bids to host the championship in 2028 must be submitted before March 23, 2022.
«UEFA has announced that its member associations interested in hosting UEFA EURO 2028 have until March 2022 to declare their interest, with the appointment of the host(s) set to take place in September 2023,» the statement from the UEFA press office reads.
«UEFA Euro 2028 is set to take place over 51 matches and feature 24 teams, as has been the case for the previous two tournaments,» according to the statement. «Joint bids are permitted, provided that the bidding countries are geographically compact.»
«In order to ensure compatibility with the competition’s sporting and commercial format, the automatic qualification of the host team(s) shall be guaranteed only for a single host or a maximum of two joint host associations, as always implemented in the past,» the UEFA stated.
«In case of more than two joint host associations, the automatic qualification of all the host teams cannot be guaranteed and shall be subject to a decision to be made in conjunction with decisions concerning the qualifying competition,» the statement added.
The next European football championship is scheduled to be hosted by Germany in 2024, while the previous edition was held earlier in the year in a number of European cities amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.
2020 UEFA Euro Cup
The 2020 UEFA Euro Cup, which was postponed last year over the global outbreak of COVID-19, ran between June 11 and July 11, 2021, in various cities across Europe. Italy won the championship defeating England in a penalty shootout on the night of July 11 at Wembley Stadium in London.
The decision to hold the 2020 Euro Cup, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2020, in various European states instead of in one or two hosting countries was made at the UEFA Executive Committee’s meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, on December 6, 2012. It was the initiative of UEFA’s then-President Michel Platini, who proposed the concept of the 2020 tournament «EURO for Europe».