By Andrew Warshaw, chief correspondent
March 15 – FIFA President Sepp Blatter has once again criticised the decision by his UEFA opposite number Michel Platini to spread the 2020 European Championship finals across the entire continent.
Europe’s governing body meets later this month to discuss the bidding process for 2020 which will be staged in up to 13 venues in a groundbreaking concept devised by Platini partly due to the lack of credible candidates to stage an expended 24-team competition.
Matches will be split into 13 packages, with 12 ordinary packages including three group matches and one knockout round (round of 16 or quarter-final), and one package covering the semi-finals and the final. There will be a maximum of one venue per country, meaning one stadium for each of the available 13 packages. Both semi-finals and the final will be played in one venue.
With so few single countries having the wherewithal to stage the competition after France in 2016, Platini wants the finals to be a pan-European celebration, with fans criss-crossing adjacent borders to support their teams.
Blatter has already expressed his concern about a pan-European 2020 and has done it again in interview with the German sports magazine, Kicker.
“A tournament should be played out in one country. As such, it creates identity and excitement,” he said. “I think UEFA is being overambitious with the 2020 tournament. It is no longer a European Championship. It needs a new name, but I don’t know what. A European championship like that is lacking in heart and soul.”
Platini has also called for the Qatar 2022 World Cup to be shared around the Gulf but Blatter responded: “Once I said to Michel Platini that, when the 2010 World Cup was being awarded, the former ruler of Libya, Colonel Gaddafi, said to me that each of Africa’s 53 countries would host a match and the final would take place in South Africa. He believed in that idea, but I told him it was unthinkable. So I also told Platini that there was nothing new about his idea.”
Blatter, who is believed to have voted for the United States to host 2022, admitted that the vote-gathering process was not only about lobbying football people. “Both diplomatic and political aspects play a considerable role in the awarding of a World Cup and the Olympic Games.”
And, he insisted, a fresh tender process would not be needed if Qatar ultimately asks to switch the World Cup to winter.
“The World Cup is held every four years in June or July. If Qatar wishes to organise it differently, then the Qataris will have to speak with FIFA. That would not mean the need for a new tender, just that a new situation had arisen on which we would have to decide. So far, the Qataris have not taken any steps towards requesting a different time period. But they do have until 2016 to do so, which is when the international match calendar is set until 2022.”
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