So here we go, then. The Euros are coming home. Five summers from now, the streets around Ballsbridge and Andersonstown will jingle and jangle with thousands of fans from across the continent. This is the Euros the scarcity of opposition bids hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.
The FAI were predictably quick out of the blocks. “These are exciting times,” gushed their statement, “and we have a very compelling Euro 2028 proposal for Uefa. Our bid is ground-breaking for the men’s European Championships and will deliver lasting legacies across the whole of the UK and Ireland.”
Will it, though? Will it really? So far as anyone can make out, the sole bricks-and-mortar legacy of the Euros appears to be the long overdue rebuilding of Casement Park. Welcome and all as that is, it’s very difficult to see what a newly built GAA ground in west Belfast has to do with the FAI. The most obvious, tangible legacy of hosting the Euros will advance the cause of not one soccer player, club or supporter on the island.
[ Euro 2028: Ireland and UK set to be confirmed as hosts for European ChampionshipsOpens in new window ]
We’re in for five years of this nonsense. Five years of the FAI preening themselves over winning a bid in which everybody else dropped out. Five years of the hosting of a major soccer tournament being used as a veneer, the ultimate case of lipstick being smeared upon on a pig. Look at our shiny European Championships! Coming your way thanks to one stadium belonging to the GAA and another that is majority-owned by the IRFU.
All of which would be fine and indeed perfectly tolerable if there was any sense of an actual legacy for soccer in Ireland being left by the tournament. Let’s say the FAI were able to lay out, bullet point by bullet point, the money that would go into the League of Ireland as a result of all this – then we’d be getting somewhere.
If this is all such a great opportunity for the game in this country, then let’s see it. League of Ireland attendances are rising by the season. Even sports fans with no interest whatsoever in the league can sniff the air right now and get the sense that there’s something vibrant and vital happening in the game. But they need the stadiums to be bigger and better and safer and nicer before there’s any chance of them trying it out.
The FAI are the guardians of the game here. That’s not a small job and nobody is pretending it’s straightforward. The previous regime has left them with endless bubbles under the wallpaper and every time they go to fix one problem, five others pop up. You can’t be interested in sport in Ireland and be blind to the enormous task they have on their hands to fix a system with decades of disrepair built into it.
But they have to be up front with people too. They need to do better than woolly promises of lasting legacies. People can see through that. They know it’s prime corporate bullshit, the sort of catch-all guff that organisations wave around when they have nothing specific to point to. If the FAI are going to spend the next five years trumpeting their Euro 2028 bonanza, they’re going to have to be better at explaining exactly why this is a good thing.
That goes for the Government as well. As underwriters of the bid, they need to be up front with everyone about what that entails. How much will the security cost? And the marketing? And the transport upgrades? What changes are going to be made to the tax laws to keep the players who come here in the summer of 2028 beyond the claws of the exchequer? How much of those costs will be borne by Uefa?
Answer: none, zero, zip. Every minister and politician whose shoulders loosen out over the next five years when their interview changes tack from the big news story of the day to the calmer waters of the Euros should be made to acknowledge this. It is the Irish people who are helping Uefa by hosting the tournament. This isn’t some wonderful act of generosity bestowed upon us – if they thought Turkey could have made them more money, the tournament wouldn’t be coming here.
So whether it’s Thomas Byrne, Catherine Martin, Michael McGrath and Paschal Donohoe now, or whoever the sports and finance ministries go to in the next government, they can’t be allowed to get away with the old legacy ding-dong either. The official bid claims the games that come here will be worth €241 million to the local economy. We’ll see. There was talk that the Europa League final in 2011 was going to be worth €100m to the Dublin economy and it eventually washed out at €20m. So let’s settle down on all the big talk.
The bid is done now. The Euros are coming. Nobody has to be talked around. The FAI, the IFA, the governments on both sides of the Border – they can all be straight with people. If all the 2028 European Championships are going to be is a few fun days in the sun, then so be it. Just don’t be yakking on about legacy this and socio-economic that and community impact the other.
All that kind of talk tells people is that you have nothing of real substance to say.
