OT - Host nation of Euro 2016 revealed
Were from France!
...in poor shape, eh? Every time I'm in Italia and I turn on the televisione to watch a Serie A game, the stadio is empty because of a fan violence penalty. Hard to understand how their stadi get so abused when so many games are played accompanied by complete silenzio.
Were they given a choice this time?
... Turkey has roughly the same GDP and in many areas a stronger economy. Safety would definitely be an issue, but my money has this going down on racism. There is a significant backlash against Turkish immigrants in many Western European countries. For all their enlightenment, Western Europeans can be as prejudice as backwater foks in the US.
The Armenian Genocide thing doesn't help, either.
I don't think it's fair to accuse the voters of bigotry. As of right now, Turkey could not host this competition. Its bid was based on the expectation that something like seven new stadiums could be built (and several others could be refurbished) by 2016, along with a bunch of highway and rail line upgrades. This coming after the 2012 Euro is looking like a potential fiasco as Poland and Ukraine are facing all kinds of delays. And still, Turkey came within a single vote of winning.
... what would a message board be without baseless accusations that cannot be disproved?
dignified?
By that logic France should just host the tourney every year since they did such a great job hosting wc 98. Why even have other countries try? I think it is fair to question if politics played a role in this. The truth is you don't know any more than anybody else what the reasons behind the votes were, so why is it unfair to question it? Assuming bigotry couldn't have played an issue simply because the vote was close is kind of stupid. If the vote was so close maybe there wasn't that much concern about Turkey's logistical capabilities, so maybe something else played into it. I don't know and you don't either.
Let's stick to Occam's Razor here. France has most of its infrastructure in place already and has funding lined up for what it does need to build. Turkey has neither, and given that it's a considerably poorer country, who knows if it can get it done in six years? Were it not for the fact that France has hosted the Euro twice before, it probably wouldn't even have been a contest.
Four years ago UEFA rolled the dice on Poland and Ukraine, who weren't remotely prepared but promised everything would be finished by 2012. That is now looking dicey, and I'd imagine that UEFA is leery of going through this again. What Turkey should do is go ahead with a lot of the construction now, which would leave it in good position to win the 2020 Euro.
Incidentally, the U.S. is making the same "infrastructure already in place" argument to state its case for the 2018 World Cup.
have some of the oldest stadiums among the Euro elite countries now?
Does France even have to build one stadium for this, they have beautiful facilities available after hosting the world cup.
Italian stadiums are pretty outdated. The feeling is they need the motivation of winning a Euro cup bid to get to work updating the stadiums, although they are starting to slowly do so. Juventus just starting breaking ground on a new stadium in Turin, and both Roma and Lazio are trying to get bids for their own new stadiums built so they can move out of the olimpico, but I don't think either of those are moving yet.
Yeah, they really have been slacking on the maintenance. The stadiums in Rome are really crumbling.
