Italy in danger of losing right to stage Euro 2012
LONDON (Reuters) - In just over six weeks, UEFA's executive committee will meet in Cardiff to decide where to stage the 2012 European Championship.
They will have three choices on the table when they meet on April 18 -- joint bids from Poland/Ukraine and Hungary/Croatia and one from Italy.
But Inter Milan's fracas with Valencia in the Champions League this week could have been the final nail in the coffin for the Italians.
Their bid is not exactly dead and buried but the casket containing their dreams is very close to being pushed into the grave the Italians have dug for themselves.
As ever with candidates bidding to stage any major championship, each bid has its pros and cons and winning bids are often decided, after months of campaigning, in a final keynote speech or presentation made to the governing body.
The Italians, of course, are old hands at winning these kinds of bidding wars. Since World War Two they have hosted Summer and Winter Olympics, the World Cup and two European Championships.
But there is a growing school of thought within UEFA circles that Italy cannot be allowed to host the European Championship for a third time in 2012 because it would look as though UEFA would be condoning all the excesses that have blighted the game there in the recent past.
UEFA might also have a problem with Poland because of administrative issues which have affected Poland's relationship with FIFA. However, a rapprochement is being effected between the Poles and the world governing body and the current image of Polish football is nowhere near as bad as that of Italy.
PLATINI'S POSITION
Oddly, even though he spent a major part of his career in Italy with Juventus and has ancestral roots in the country, the position of UEFA president Michel Platini is an intriguing one as far as the Italian candidature is concerned.
During his recent campaign to be elected UEFA's president, Platini advocated an end to the domination of the Champions League by so many clubs competing from the biggest countries in Europe.
He maintains it is time for football to return, in a sense, to its more romantic, sporting roots.
Rather than four clubs from England, Italy, Spain and Germany playing in the Champions League he would rather see three clubs from each of those countries taking part, opening the way for the champions of middle-ranking nations to have a more realistic shot in Europe's premier club competition.
"When I was a player, you would have European Cup games in Iceland or Romania or Albania. Now those countries have none or little chance of hosting the big teams, it is time that changed."
Platini is also advocating that a new Europe-wide sporting police force should be created to deal with violence and hooliganism at matches.
If his UEFA colleagues read those messages together they could easily conclude that the UEFA president would prefer the European Championship to go countries which are not usually in the limelight. Or countries which are not totally beset by troubles as Italy seems to be right now.
TARNISHED IMAGE
The latest horror show to blight Italy's already tarnished image appeared on TV screens around the world on Tuesday when Inter Milan players were involved in a brawl with Valencia players after being eliminated from the Champions League.
Last year, the grand "Old Lady" of Italian football, Platini's old club Juventus, was stripped of the title and demoted to Serie B for the first time in its history for its involvement in a match-fixing scandal. Other Serie A clubs were docked points and leading officials disciplined for their roles.
This year a policeman was killed at a match in Sicily and in the aftermath the Government closed stadiums and brought in new rules on crowd control. Last year's World Cup victory in Germany, when Italy became world champions for the fourth time, now seems light years away.
UEFA is an innately conservative organisation, and in a perfect world there is little doubt they would like to award the finals to the Italians, who they know organised a great World Cup in 1990 and have the facilities to put on a superb show in 2012.
But they voted Platini in as president in January, bringing to an end Lennart Johansson's 16-year reign -- and, if they were to follow the ideas of their new president, they might well decide it is time to make another change.
Instead of going for Italy, they could award the games to Hungary, the forgotten giant of European football, and Croatia, or even give a chance to the Poles and the Ukrainians -- even though they have been far from united and neighbourly in their approach to hosting the event.
If UEFA did decide to give Euro 2012 to either of their rival bidders, the Italians could blame nobody but themselves.
Reuters
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