David Taylor, UEFA's former general secretary and now CEO of UEFA Events SA, has said that one of the challenges in preparation for the Euro 2012 European football championship is the distances between the cities and possible transport problems the tournament could face.
“One of the challenges of the tournament was the distances between cities, but this is the geography and we cannot move cities, we could only move people,” he told reporters on Thursday, March 9, in Warsaw where a workshop for national football delegations from the participating teams was held on March 8 and March 9.
The UEFA official said that transport and logistics problems could appear during the course of the tournament, so UEFA expects that Ukrainian and Polish authorities will be flexible in settling the issues. He said that cooperation with hosting countries over the past two years gives grounds to have the said issued successfully settled.
“I would say that we cannot guarantee good football on the field, but we can guarantee good accommodations during the tournament. We’ll have stadia filled, we’ve sold the tickets. We have resources to move people. For example, Ukraine has adopted some decisions, the introduction of the Open Sky policy in particular,” he said.
Taylor recalled that 13 out of 16 teams will base in Poland. He said that the national associations decided on their training locations.
The UEFA Events SA chief executive noted that infrastructure in Poland is more developed compared to that in Ukraine, and UEFA wants to be sure that Poland will cope with transport problems due to such number of teams to be camped in the country.
Taylor again proposed to hotels in Ukraine to think about the prices of rooms.
"There are issues around the high cost of hotels in Ukraine in particular. That is causing us some concern. Of course UEFA cannot fix that ourselves. We don’t manage hotels. But we do think it’s not a very good image to present of trying to charge as much as possible. We speak to the authorities, we speak to hotels, we try to ensure that they understand the importance of trying to set prices at a reasonable level so that, in future years, people who come to Ukraine can enjoy it and come back,” he said.
The problem of the prices in Ukraine is partly due to the scarcity of the hotels there compared to Poland, and the normal hotel price in Ukraine is several times the cost of a hotel in Poland in any event.
Taylor praised the enormous strides taken by co-hosts Poland and Ukraine in preparing for Euro 2012.
All of the stadia for Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine are now fully constructed and ready for the tournament, and the facilities to be left after the tournament will be a good basis for the development of football in Poland and Ukraine, he said.
Taylor is confident that Euro 2012 will be a successful tournament.
There were certain issues and problems during preparation, but now we could say that the tournament will be magnificent celebration of European football. We’ve reached the final stage of preparations, the UEFA official said.
