Euro 2012: selecting the hosts

The process of selecting the country (or countries) that will host the European Championships started all the way back in 2005 where 5 bids were announced from a total of 7 countries. These countries were: Greece, Italy, Turkey and the join bids of Croatia & Hungary and Poland & Ukraine. In the first stage of the bidding process the dossiers include a generic overview of how they envisage to host the competition, what stadia and generic infrastructure will be used and what renovations and constructions might be needed.
In 2005 the European Football Association Executive Committee examined all the nominations and short-listed the bids reducing them down to 3. The applications from Greece and Turkey were deemed unsuccessful and the rest of the bids were given the go ahead to create detailed presentations of how they could plan and organise one of the most prestigious competitions in the world. The deadline was defined for the end of May 2006 with the date for the announcement of the winning bid declared for the beginning of December 2006.

Due to the elections for the UEFA president (won my Michel Platini) the final selection was later postponed for the middle of April the following year, 2007. The official reason given by UEFA was to allow more time for the bidding associations to fine tune their plans. This move was deemed unfair by Greece and Turkey as well as a few other countries that could have opted in with increased chances have they had more time to prepare their initial applications.

The UEFA Executive Committee gathered in Cardiff, Wales and announced the winning bid. as we all now know well that was the bid submitted by Poland and Ukraine. Without a doubt that was a big surprise considering that the favourite (Italy) had already gathered the majority of the votes on the first voting round where five bids were still in the game. A sad outcome from the voting was that the join bid from Croatia and Hungary didn't get any votes so the votes were 8 for Poland/Ukraine and 4 for Italy.

In the following months and years the preparation course for Poland and Ukraine had its ups and downs reaching an all time low in December 2010 where rumours were widespread that Germany and England would be on stand by to host the competition in case the new stadia wouldn't be completed. This was a result of numerous delays in the construction of venues and roads mainly in Ukraine. However - as we now know - all these problems were successfully solved and the European Championships 2012 are ready to take place in the proud hosts Poland and Ukraine.