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Editorial October 2011
Soccerphile Editorial - October 2011
What legacy will Euro 2012 leave for Poland & Ukraine
After all the doubts, Euro 2012 will take place in Poland and the Ukraine as planned. One by one the tournament's eight venues are being unveiled, transport links and other vital infrastructure continue to undergo daily improvements and UEFA chief Michel Platini has said an ultimatum he delivered to Ukraine over their slow pace of progress no longer stands. But when the final whistle blows at Kiev's revamped Olympic Stadium, what impact will Euro 2012 have on the two countries?
Poland and Ukraine saw off Italy and a joint bid between Croatia and Hungary for the right to host the fourteenth edition of the European Championship of football. When the decision was announced in April 2007, it was the latest in a long line of steps by FIFA and its most powerful national confederation UEFA to spread the football gospel outside traditionally safe commercial markets. However, the advent of successive global financial crises soon had critics questioning the wisdom of UEFA's decision, particularly with Ukraine struggling to finance building works in its four designated host cities.
Capital city Kiev, culturally significant Lviv, the eastern city of Donetsk and historic Kharkiv will all host Euro 2012 fixtures, and Kiev's fully refurbished Olympic Stadium is set to host the tournament's grand finale. Yet questions remain over the wisdom of hosting games in Donetsk and Kharkiv - two cities where a lack of existing tourist infrastructure could prove a major headache once thousands of boisterous football fans begin to arrive in the country.
Indeed, with mid-range accommodation scarce and public transport links varying between unreliable to non-existent, Ukrainian authorities have embarked on an ambitious building program aimed at improving the nation's highway and train networks and guaranteeing adequate hotel facilities. The transformation hasn't been quite as hectic in Poland, where the closest they've come to a major fiasco saw the Polish government censure the Polish Football Association - a situation hastily rectified when UEFA threatened to remove Euro 2012 co-hosting rights over government interference.
Poland's four host cities include capital Warsaw, Poznan, Wroclaw and Gdansk, with the latter lying enticingly on the Baltic Sea coastline. All four Polish venues have undergone significant refurbishments, some of which have taken longer than expected to complete, however there's no doubt they'll be ready once the big kick-off rolls around next June. The historic city of Krakow missed out on hosting fixtures, despite the local council making significant improvements to the Henryk Reyman Stadium home of Ekstraklasa heavyweights Wisla Krakow, while the southern city of Chorzow was overlooked even though the Polish national team called it home for more than forty years.
The headlong rush into the future invites speculation as to the kind of legacy Euro 2012 is destined to leave on the two countries. For all the new hotel rooms and airport upgrades, the question for many is whether Poland or Ukraine actually needs them. The size of stadia is a particular problem, with Euro 2012 grounds set to dwarf non-host city venues well into the respective futures of the Ekstraklasa and Ukrainian Premier League. It seems empty seats are the new norm in Europe's ultra-modern football arenas and already the spectre of Portugal's Estadio Algarve - an essentially useless Euro 2004 relic in a region which hasn't hosted top-flight Portugese football for years - looms large.
There's also the question of whether travelling fans will actually experience any of the culture of the two countries they're visiting. As the second largest country in Europe in terms of land mass, Ukraine's vast size makes overland travel difficult. Meanwhile, some of Poland's most significant cultural sites miss out on hosting visitors altogether given that only four Polish cities were selected as hosts. Had the tournament taken place in just one nation, it may have doubled fans' chances of taking in sights rather than criss-crossing two vast countries in order to simply reach matchday venues.
After Japan and South Korea co-hosted the 2002 World Cup, FIFA declared they would never again allow football's premier international tournament to be staged by two different countries. That's not a prerogative UEFA have seen fit to follow, and Euro 2008 was successfully co-hosted by Austria and Switzerland. Those two nations share at least one common language and both enjoyed relative economic and social stability at a time when Europe was wracked by tense political relations during the Soviet era. It's that Soviet era Poland and Ukraine are keen to confine to the dusty annals of history and the two nations have not surprisingly lauded UEFA for awarding them co-hosting rights.
But the sceptics continue to snipe as the clock ticks ever closer towards Euro 2012, and the spectre of hooliganism and concerns over the readiness of two relatively homogenous societies to welcome the multicultural hordes weigh heavily on the keyboards of opinion makers in the western European press. And despite history telling us that such concerns are generally unfounded, there's a palpable feeling doubts will linger until the final ball has been kicked, as Poland and Ukraine grapple with the question of what exactly they'll derive from co-hosting the European Championship.
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