With Euro 2012 kicking off in Poland and Ukraine, here’s a brief introduction to the look and teams at this year’s European Football Championship.
The 2012 tournament will be jointly held by Poland and Ukraine. It’s the last-ever European Championship kick-off with only 16 teams participating, and UEFA has decided that in 2016, the tournament will be contested by 24 countries!
The UEFA European Championship (formerly known as the European Nations Cup) is the international football tournament in Europe. Since 1984, the European Championships have been known colloquially as the Euros, with this year’s supplement. So the 1984 event was called Euro 84, 1988 Euro 88, etc. Since the turn of the millennium, the whole year has been used: Euro 2000, Euro 2004, Euro 2008, and soon Euro 2012.
The final tournament is held every four years, in the middle of each quarter of the World Cup. For example, the World Cup finals were held in 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2010 while the European Championship finals were held in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008. The next European Championship is held in 2012 in Poland and Ukraine.
Since its beginnings in France 56 years ago, when four teams competed for the title, the Euro has come a long way.
Every national team in Europe is eligible to enter, provided they are affiliated with UEFA (the Confederation of European Football), the governing body for football in Europe.
The tournament is organized according to the same principles as the World Cup. There is a qualification cycle, for which each participant competes, followed by a final tournament, in which 16 finalists participate.
Hosts are always disqualified, so for Euro 2012 Poland and Ukraine will automatically enter, and there is only room for 14 more teams.
Countries are selected into 1 of 7 seeded qualifying groups, with the rankings based on past performance in the World Cup and European Championships, and the FIFA World Seed Ranking. The nations play at home and away against any other team in their group, and the winners and runners-up in the resulting mini-league qualify for the finals.
Once they reach the finals, the 16 teams are seeded, then drawn into 4 groups of 4. After playing with each other once, the winners and runner-ups in those groups advance to the quarter-finals, where each group winner is paired with an -up runner from a group different. From then on, it’s a straight knockout, from the semi-finals to the final.