Euro 2008: the benchmark is set

Uefa inspectors take in the construction site of Geneva's new soccer stadium swissinfo.ch

The joint Swiss-Austrian bid to host the 2008 European football championship has impressed a visiting team of Uefa inspectors.

But they are yet to see the other six candidates.

Mike Lee, director of communications for Uefa, the sport’s governing body in Europe, said the visit had been “superbly organised” and that the Uefa officials had been “very impressed”.

“This week, Austria and Switzerland have set the benchmark,” Lee told a press conference in Geneva, the last stop on whirlwind five-day tour of the eight proposed venues for the tournament.

The others are Zurich, Bern and Basel in Switzerland, and Vienna, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt and Salzburg in Austria.

Well-established infrastructure

“But there’s still a long way to go,” Lee added. The inspection team will, over the next two months, be visiting the other candidates: a four-country Nordic bid; Russia; Scotland and Ireland; Hungary; Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia; and Greece and Turkey.

Of the eight stadia that form part of the Swiss-Austrian bid, only two are currently in use. The rest are being renovated, rebuilt or started from scratch. But the Uefa officials will have noted that transport and tourism infrastructure is well established.

They also stressed that one of the most heartening aspects of their trip was that they had been convinced of the significant support the bid had from politicians, the business community and the public in both countries.

That was particularly in evidence at a friendly international between the two countries in Basel on Wednesday evening.

“We really sensed that the football associations had managed to get the authorities and the media behind this bid. That’s a very positive sign,” said Jakob Erel, Uefa’s director of competition operations.

He said the situation on the ground had lived up to the expectations raised by the weighty 670-page bidding document that was handed in to Uefa in June.

December D-Day

Once all the candidate countries have been visited, the inspectors will evaluate what they have seen and deliver reports on each bid to Uefa’s executive committee, which is based in Nyon, near Geneva.

On December 11, the bidding teams will deliver a final half-hour presentation, and two days later the winner will be announced.

The inspection visit, though, is the decisive moment for the bid. The president of the Swiss Football Association, Ralph Zloczower, said about 70 per cent of the work had now been done.

He praised the Uefa inspection, calling it “fair, serious and human”, and stressed the fact that Switzerland and Austria were working very closely together.

“Our two countries are excellent together. We are federal states, and have a similar mentality. We solve problems in the same way,” he said.

That is in contrast to other candidates, such as Greece-Turkey and Bosnia-Croatia. There is a concern in the Swiss camp that, despite the merits of their bid, and despite the fact that the inspection team will deliver an objective assessment, the final decision – taken by the Uefa executive committee – may be political.

Political gesture?

There have been suggestions that giving the tournament to a joint bid by erstwhile enemies or countries that have recently experienced conflict would have huge symbolic value. There is also a considerable animosity within Uefa towards Sepp Blatter, the Swiss-born president of the world’s governing body, Fifa.

“The executive committee have to make their own minds up,” Lee told swissinfo. “We’re not in the business of political gestures. We want to see a great tournament.”

One poignant moment came when Zloczower produced a faded piece of card from his pocket – a ticket to the 1954 World Cup final in Berne.

“I’m probably the only person here who attended that match,” he said. “I have a dream that I will have a ticket to the 2008 European championship final in Vienna.”

by Roy Probert

Key facts

A 670-page bidding document was submitted to UEFA.
Of the eight stadia that form the bid, only two are now in use.
The decision by UEFA will be announced on December 13.