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The Aviva Stadium would stage Euro 2020 games if Dublin is successful. EMPICS Sport
Fingers crossed

D-Day for Dublin as UEFA announce Euro 2020 host cities

This afternoon, UEFA reveals the 13 cities which will stage the European Championships in six years’ time.

IRELAND FINDS OUT whether it will be one of the 13 countries to host the 2020 European Championships when UEFA meet in Geneva, Switzerland today (12pm Irish time).

European football’s governing body will choose from 19 candidates — stretching from Israel and Spain to Azerbaijan and Wales — for the international tournament, which will be played across the continent for the first time.

Last week, UEFA released its evaluation report detailing the positives and negatives of each candidate and hopes that Dublin will be among the successful cities are high after its application was generally well-received.

If Dublin is chosen, it will be given four games (three group stages and one round of 16/quarter-final) while only Munich and London are in the hat to stage the final, with the latter believed to be favourite.

For the 60th anniversary of the European Championship, first held in 1960, UEFA decided to organise the tournament across the whole continent.

This will be “the biggest celebration of European football ever,” the organisation has already promised.

In the past, a single country — or at the most two, like Austria and Switzerland in 2008, or Poland and Ukraine in 2012 — hosted the finals.

The 2020 experiment, the brainchild of UEFA president Michel Platini, will be a one-off event however, with the 2024 tournament returning to the single-host format.

The candidates who submitted their bids are: Azerbaijan (Baku), Belarus (Minsk), Belgium (Brussels), Bulgaria (Sofia), Denmark (Copenhagen), England (London), Germany (Munich), Hungary (Budapest), Ireland (Dublin), Israel (Jerusalem), Italy (Rome), Macedonia (Skopje), Netherlands (Amsterdam), Romania (Bucharest), Russia (Saint Petersburg), Scotland (Glasgow), Spain (Bilbao), Sweden (Stockholm) and Wales (Cardiff).

AFP 2014 with additional reporting from Ben Blake

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