Euro 2028 hosting decision met with universal shrug of the shoulders
England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland will be jointly hosting the tournament, but who cares?
Even coming in the middle of an international break, when a lot of people are sitting around clicking their heels and waiting for something to happen, the final confirmation that Euro 2028 will be held in Britain and Ireland couldn’t have been met with much less of a collective shrug of the shoulders. If anything, the media reaction to it all was a fairly appropriate microcosm for these times. “Will God Save The King” be ‘respected’, should it come to be played outside England? Would a similar courtesy be extended to other anthems anywhere in England? Will Casement Park in Belfast actually get built? Where weren’t Anfield and Old Trafford on the list of venues to be used?
Few people seem particularly pleased by the announcement. Perhaps to an extent this was recognition of how unwieldy these things have become. Long gone are the days when you could just pick a few grounds, pull some names out of a hat, and get on with it. Everyone has requirements, from UEFA’s almost comically bleak “Very Very Important Persons” to the exact width of the pitch. And Manchester United supporters don’t even get a week to bask in the glory of their 2-1 win against Brentford before receiving yet another pointed reminder of the infrastructural neglect that their club has been under, these last two decades.
There isn’t really a way of squaring these circles. No-one wants to share a tournament with England, who will likely condescend their co-hosts at some point or other (if they haven’t already), while UK politics are enough of a binfire for that to have to be factored into the equation, too. And then there is the recollection of the Euro 2020 final and the lingering suspicion that these were no mere ‘hi-jinks’ brought about by the length of the pandemic lockdowns, but were instead a symbolic image of a country which is tail-spinning into a strangely nihilistic spiral of self-loathing.
This is what Casement Park looks like at the moment. It’s complicated, and it’s wrapped up in the intransigent stupidity of Northern Irish politics, but that stadium now has to be built in less than five years and the money has to come from somewhere. According to the Star, “The original cost of building the stadium was £77.5m, but is now being estimated at more than £150m”. There’s your cost of intransigence, right there. Still, at least Northern Ireland might finally actually get the first-rate sporting facility that it has been lacking for decades.
The reason Anfield isn’t being used is fairly straightforward. UEFA regulations state that all stadiums that host tournament games must measure 105m by 68m at a minimum, and Liverpool’s pitch is 101m long. There’s not much more to add that that. The new Everton stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock has been selected, so at least the city of Liverpool will be hosting some matches.
The situation regarding Old Trafford is somewhat different, in that it’s twenty years of neglect which have left the old place looking tired and tatty. Anfield is in the middle of redevelopment work right now, its capacity set to rise to 61,000. But at Old Trafford, the tired and tatty is what match-going supporters have to go through every game. There had been brief flurries of activity concerning the best of intentions on this matter. Plans, options, costings, that sort of thing. The sort of words which give the impression of movement while actually nothing whatsoever is happening.
But nothing’s happened and takeover progress has slowed to such a glacial speed that it’s difficult to tell whether it’s actually even moving any more. So Old Trafford, which had been under consideration, has missed out this time around, and this is all the more striking because this is a big tournament. All bar one of the venues hold more than 50,000 people and four of them will hold more than 60,000 by 2028.
The Etihad Stadium will be representing Manchester because, well, that’s where football is in 2023, isn’t it? Manchester City are football’s gleaming brave new world, sprinkled with Middle Eastern stardust (so long as you don’t ask too many questions about the origins of the money fuelling it) and a big modern stadium.
By comparison, Manchester United are this dusty relic, sitting in a darkened corner and sounding off to a diminishing audience about how they used to be someone, and how those two Scott McTominay goals were exactly like those two Steve Bruce goals which powered Alex Ferguson’s team, back in the days when their hair wasn’t grey and the future seemed full of possibilities.
Plenty of others have missed out too. Edinburgh isn’t represented at all, while as ever the only matches being played south of Birmingham will be in London. Yorkshire, an area with a population of 5.5m people, will not see a single game and neither will the north-east of England, with its population of 2.7m. Considering that these areas are adjacent to each other, that’s another large part of England missing out.
But these are the costs of football’s perpetual expansion. In 1996, the European Championships were a 16-team tournament which could easily be hosted in just one country. Now they sprawl to such an extent that even a joint bid between the other four countries without England turned out not to be tenable. The growth has to continue, but crowds hit those peaks? For all that people look back upon Euro 96 through rose-tinted spectacles, some of the match attendances were abysmal, and that was without factoring in what’s happened to ticket prices for these tournaments since. Look forward to fans being criticised for not buying extortionately priced tickets for matches between teams they don’t much care about.
Still, at least Jordan Henderson should have retired by then.