Expect Emotions

The 2008 European Football Championships are set to carry on the legacy of World Cup 2006 in making the tournament as "fan-friendly" as possible. Host City presents an overview of preparations in Austria and Switzerland

In the summer of 2008 Austria and Switzerland will host the 13th UEFA European Football Championship finals tournament, the continent’s premier international football event.

Ernst Happel Stadion, in Vienna, will stage the Euro 2008 final

It is only the second time in the tournament’s history that the finals are being co-hosted by two different nations, and one million spectators are expected to attend the 31 matches, with a global television audience of over eight billion.

Euro 2008, with an official slogan of “Expect emotions”, will be the largest ever sports event held in either country, both of which will use four different stadiums to hold the fixtures. The opening match on 7 June will feature Switzerland’s national team at St Jakob’s Park in Basle, with the final taking place on 29 June at the Ernst Happel Stadion in Austria’s capital city, Vienna. The finals are the first major tournament under the charge of new UEFA president Michel Platini – a celebrated French footballer of the 1980s – since he was elected at the start of 2007.

But Platini has not changed any of the ongoing processes of organising the finals and confirmed his full support for Martin Kallen, the chief operating officer of tournament organisers Euro 2008 SA.

However, Platini may yet attempt to stamp his own personal mark on the tournament. "The atmosphere will grow little by little,“ he told the UEFA website. “And if I can help to provide a great festival, I will not deprive myself of doing so.

“It will be a time for Austria and Switzerland to show who they are as countries and what they can do."

Austria and Switzerland were awarded the finals in December 2002, defeating Hungary in the final vote after another joint bid, from Greece and Turkey, was refused. The Austrian-Swiss “Close to you” campaign had successfully persuaded UEFA that their geographical position in central Europe, making the finals accessible to fans across the continent, made them the perfect hosts.

St Jakob's Park in Basle will host the opening
match on 7 June

However, their hosting of the tournament was thrown into doubt in 2004 when then UEFA president Lennart Johansson threatened to take the finals elsewhere if they failed to overcome organisational difficulties.

Building work on Zurich’s Hardturm Stadion had been halted because of political opposition from several groups, including the city’s Green Party, and it seemed that Austria and Switzerland would fail to deliver on their manifesto promise to supply eight stadiums for the finals.

Johansson was also concerned about outstanding security costs and the failure of the organisers to sign contracts with the other seven host stadiums. Fortunately the Zurich problems were remedied in January 2005 with the decision to renovate instead the Letzigrund Stadion, the home of FC Zurich, which will re-open in September 2007 with a capacity of 30,000 spectators and facilities for holding athletics events and music concerts.

The opening of the Letzigrund Stadion will mark the successful completion of all the tournament stadiums, with nine months to spare. A Euro 2008 spokesman said: “There are still a lot of things to do but we are perfectly on time. All the stadiums will be ready by September 2007."

The biggest Euro 2008 venues, St Jakob’s Park in Basle and the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna, will be used for the opening ceremony and tournament final respectively. Both stadiums have a UEFA 5-star grading, the highest accolade awarded to European football venues, and each will host two quarter-final matches and one semi-final.

The 42,500-seater St Jakob’s Park was completed in 2001 to become the first multi-functional stadium in Switzerland – it also hosts music concerts, opera, car exhibitions and a multitude of corporate events.

The complex also includes a three-storey, 16,500 sq m shopping centre, offices, a fitness centre and accommodation for elderly people with 107 apartments.

The Ernst Happel Stadium is an all-seater, all-covered venue with a capacity of 53,000 and previously staged the 1995 final of the UEFA Champions League, the biggest club competition in European football.

The stadium is part of Wiener Stadthallen, a leisure complex on the banks of the River Danube, which has facilities to hold music concerts and a number of different sporting events.

Modifications were completed in 2005 to bring the stadium into line with the latest UEFA guidelines on technology and infrastructure, and an underground train line is being extended to link the stadium with the centre of Vienna. Transport links to the Ernst Happel will be further improved by a new traffic control system.

Meanwhile the roof of the 30,000-capacity Stade de Suisse Wankdorf in Berne, which will host three Group C matches, contains the largest integrated solar power system in the world, which is a showpiece of tournament sponsors BKW, a major energy supplier.

The solar panel is used to store energy that is either used for the stadium‘s operations or distributed within the BKW power network.

Elsewhere, Euro 2008 matches will be played at modern, well-equipped 30,000 capacity all-seater stadiums in the Austrian cities of Innsbruck, Klagenfurt and Salzburg, and the Swiss city of Geneva.

The Swiss football association has been testing all of its Euro 2008 stadiums with high-profile matches, with Basle, Geneva and Zurich all hosting international friendly matches and the Stade de Suisse in Berne staging the 2007 Swiss Cup Final.

Euro 2008 SA decided that over 75 per cent match tickets for the finals would be made available to “ordinary fans”, perhaps in response to criticism of ticketing arrangements for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, where it was felt the ticket distribution was weighted too heavily in favour of corporate sponsors.

"Our aim, bearing in mind the relatively small size of the stadiums, was to offer a particularly high proportion of the tickets directly to the fans," said Christian Mutschler, the Switzerland tournament director for Euro 2008 SA. "This proportion will be more than the 75 per cent we had aimed for, when you take into account that some of the sponsors' tickets will also go to the fans via competitions and draws."

For each match, over a third of tickets will be sold to fans of the two competing teams, via their national football associations, with a further third sold to general football fans via the tournament website, www.euro2008.com, for which there has been a huge demand.

With fans able to apply for tickets throughout March 2007, UEFA had received 2.5 million applications by the middle of the month, with 233,000 applications for the final match alone. Ballots will be held to decide which applicants are lucky enough to receive tickets. Furthermore, 750 tickets for each match will be sold to local residents who live within the postal codes surrounding the stadium.

Those fans not at the stadiums will be catered for by the public showing of matches on giant screens in the eight host cities and up to a dozen other cities across Austria and Switzerland. Each host city will boast a fan zone, a scheme which proved such a success at World Cup 2006, each of which will be sponsored by financial advisers UBS.

The enormous enthusiasm for Euro 2008 has been matched by corporate sponsors with UEFA’s global sponsorship programme completed just under two years ahead of the tournament. The 10 global sponsors are BenQ, Adidas, Continental, Castrol, and the six Uefa “Eurotop” partners: Carlsberg, Coca-Cola, JVC, Hyundai-Kia, MasterCard and McDonald's.

In addition, UEFA has made provision for four national sponsors, or “National Supporters”, from each of Austria and Switzerland, who will contribute through their services to the staging of the event.

Although Euro 2008 SA has made sure that ordinary fans have the majority of match tickets, a first-class corporate hospitality package is being promoted by British company IMG. A typical match day experience for corporate hospitality customers at Euro 2008 will include a prime “category 1” match ticket, guest access pass, reserved parking space, gourmet dining experience (courtesy of Austrian catering company DO & CO Restaurants & Catering AG), a limited edition commemorative gift and the official match programme.

The choice of Austria and Switzerland as Euro 2008 hosts may have been a surprise in some quarters, as neither nation is regarded as a modern super-power of European Football. But these beautiful countries seem to have the quality of stadiums, infrastructure and planning to make a huge success of the finals, with the consideration of fans at the forefront of their strategy.