EURO 2021

  But wait a minute…have UEFA been smoking too many Jamaican cigarettes, or something?We watched with baited breath as UEFA president, Michele Platini (above), stood on stage in Cardiff, Wales, and slowly tore open the envelope. It was between Croatia/Hungary, Italy and Poland/Ukraine. Everyone expected Italy. Half of me didn’t want Poland to win, as I knew I would have to throw together something about the story in about half an hour. The other half of me – the footballing half (the bits with legs and feet) – wanted Poland […]

More medium-class hotels will be built in Poland in preparation for the 2012 European Soccer Championships. Jozef Ratajski from the Polish Tourist Chamber said that the country lacked a sufficient network of rationally priced two and three-star hotels. Andrzej Saja from the Polish Hoteliers’ Economic Chamber pointed out that medium hotel construction would probably be a rising market in coming years. The Championship will certainly be a promotional impulse for Poland, Saja remarked. At the moment there are over 1,320 hotels in Poland. Poland and Ukraine were chosen to co-host […]

Poland is considering enlisting as many as 20,000 prisoners to help build the stadiums, roads and hotels that it desperately needs to co-host the Euro 2012 soccer tournament. Pawel Nasilowski, deputy chief of Poland’s prisons, was quoted by the PAP news agency yesterday as saying that use of the inmates was being considered as part of an EU program to rehabilitate prisoners. Poland is grappling with a shortage of manual labour, particularly of construction workers, amid a booming economy and the departure of hundreds of thousands of Poles to better-paying […]

Poland and Ukraine have been chosen to host the 2012 European Championships. Euro 2012 is a great transportation challenge for the host countries. Poland and the Ukraine must ensure that spectators are able to transfer freely between the cities where games will take place, as well as around these cities. These preparations are supervised by coordinators of transportation and airports. Their task it to make sure the construction and adaptation of roads, highways, train stations and railroads, together with airports – from planning to the moment of obtaining operating permits. […]