Euro 2012 Hosts

Poland and Ukraine won the fight to host the quadrennial tournament involving the continent's top nations, ahead of Italy and another joint bid from Hungary/Croatia.

It will be the first time that either Poland or Ukraine have hosted a major football championship and will be seen as a major boost to the sport in eastern Europe in the face of decades of domination from wealthy western countries.

Next year's Euro 2008 finals will be jointly held by Austria and Switzerland.

Major shock

The decision, announced by new UEFA president Michel Platini, was a huge shock as world champions Italy had been hot favorites, while the Polish/Ukraine bid was seen as the rank outsider.

The Italians had been calling for a fresh start following concerns over the match-fixing scandal that rocked their domestic football last year and the crowd violence that halted all play earlier this year.

They boasted the best existing infrastructure and the experience of hosting two previous European championships in 1968 and 1980, the 1990 World Cup finals and last year's Winter Olympics in Turin.

The quadrennial tournament was jointly hosted by Belgium and the Netherlands in 2000 and will be shared between Austria and Switzerland next year, but organizational problems were raised in the cases of Poland/Ukraine and Hungary/Croatia.

However, UEFA officials pushed these concerns aside and instead grabbed the chance to award the finals to former East Bloc countries for the first time since Yugoslavia hosted the 1976 finals.

Infrastructure issues

Much had been made about the long distances involved for teams if UEFA awarded the finals to Poland and Ukraine; issues were also made of the poor state of the roads linking the two countries and the lack of proper stadiums.

Yet the joint bid had enthusiastic backing from the Polish government and former leader Lech Walesa, who called on UEFA to grab the opportunity to spread its boundaries and recognize the political and social changes that have swept across eastern Europe in the last 15 years.

The winning bid featured eight venues for the finals in seven years time, four in Poland and four in Ukraine.

The UEFA decision brought immediate praise from Ukraine's top football official Grigory Surkis.

"We are grateful to all of the UEFA executive council members for their decision to accord us the right to host the European championship," Surkis told Ukrainian television.

"I promise that we will do our best to hold the championship at the highest possible level," he added.

In Warsaw, football fans and officials who gathered in the city center to watch the announcement on a giant television screen burst into applause and chants.

"It will be our chance to show we are capable of organizing large sports events like world championships or even the Olympics," said Przemyslaw Gosiewski, an aide to Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

"This is our passport to enter the club of elite countries," he added.

Giving eastern countries a chance

In Rome, the reaction was much more muted, with Italian Sports Minister Giovanna Melandri saying the decision had been mainly a political one.

"They wanted to open up the finals to former eastern bloc countries who are striving to fully join the European scene," she said. "We just have to accept it in the name of sports and now try to win on the field."

The 2012 finals will once again feature 16 teams despite UEFA examining a proposal to extend it to 24 countries.

Greece are the current European champions having won the title in Lisbon in 2004. Neither Poland nor Ukraine have won the European title.