Euro 2012
The UEFA European Championship is a major tournament for European national football teams. It has been held every four years since 1960 in the even years between the FIFA World Cup.
History
Formally known as the European Nations Cup, the tournament was renamed the European Championship in 1968 but only featured four or eight countries. In 1996 the number of competing nations was doubled to 16 and since then the tournament has been referred to as ‘Euro’, followed by the year in which the tournament is played, hence Euro 2012.
Qualifying
Qualifying for the tournament begins in the autumn of the preceding World Cup year and runs for nearly two years before the tournament finals take place in the summer of the appropriate year. Every team must qualify for the European Championship finals except for the country hosting the tournament which gets an automatic entry. In 2012 the tournament will be jointly hosted by Poland and Ukraine, giving both nations a bye to the finals.
Before the qualifying process, each team is seeded by UEFA and then drawn into groups from separate pre-seeded bowls. For Euro 2012 there are nine qualifying groups, six with six nations and three with five nations.
The groups are played in a league format with each team playing every other team in their group home and away. Depending on where they finish in the group, teams either qualify for the finals directly, or go through to another play off round to determine the final few teams to qualify for the finals.
The Tournament
The final tournament sees 16 teams divided equally into four groups again using seeding to keep the strongest teams apart. Each team plays each of their group opponents once and the top two teams from each group qualify for the quarter final stage where a knockout system is used.
If any match in the knockout rounds is drawn after 90 minutes, extra time and penalties are employed to separate the teams. Unlike the Fifa World Cup there is no third place playoff in the European Championships.
Records
Since the tournament began, 27 different countries have appeared at least once in the finals tournament, and of those, 12 have contested the final. There have been nine different winners of the European Championships but only three nations have won the title on more than one occasion. Germany hold the record having won it three times, whilst Spain and France have both won it twice.
Although no country has ever successfully defended the European title, in recent years the winner of the European championship has gone on to win the next World Cup tournament, or vice versa. France won the World Cup in 1998 and then went on to succeed in Euro 2000, whilst Spain recorded victory in Euro 2008 before going on to claim their first ever World Cup trophy earlier this year.
Read about betting on the Euro 2012.