Staging a multi-country event in a pandemic is a challenge, but there is a whiff of optimism about this summer’s
Football feast
It is billed as an 11-city football extravaganza from Baku to Bucharest, Seville to St Petersburg. But when Euro 2020 kicks off a year and a day later than planned in Rome on Friday night, a continent will be holding its breath. For while the tournament is the biggest and most ambitious event since the onset of the pandemic and a significant staging post on the road back to normality, the hope and expectation will inevitably be laced with uncertainty.
How could there not be nervousness, given that 24 teams will be crisscrossing Europe to play 51 matches in the teeth of a global pandemic? When the idea of staging a multi-country tournament was conceived by the then Uefa president, Michel Platini, in 2012, he conceded that it was “perhaps a bit zany”. Given the challenges Uefa has faced from Covid as European football’s governing body, officials could have been forgiven for echoing Edmund Blackadder by sticking underpants on their heads, shoving a couple of pencils up their noses and crying “wibble”.