Europe Football Championship of 2012 will be held in Ukraine and Poland. Such a decision was made on the session of the Executive Committee of Union of the European Football Associations (UEFA) committee in Cardiff (Wales) and was announced by the President of UEFA Michel Platini. Common application of Ukraine and Poland benefited the ones from Croatia, Italy and Hungary.

In the solemn speech President of Football Federation of Ukraine Grigory Surkis promised to live up that high honor that UEFA paid to Ukraine. The football championships of World or Europe in their current format have never been held on the territory of republics of the former USSR. From all would-be countries Italy was the most experienced in the field of having football contests of the highest level: Italians already possessed Europe championships twice (in 1968 and 1980), as well as World championships (1934 and 1990).

Firstly the claiming countries wishing to be the “home” for coming event were Greece and Turkey, hence on the meeting of Executive Committee of UEFA that took place on 8, November 2005, they were eliminated. It was predicted that the place of the 14-th Europe Football Championship holding will be proclaimed in December 2006, but UEFA decided to delay this date until April 2007.

From 1980 when Europe Championship started to be carried out according to current formula (firstly 8 teams participated, and then 16), it was received by Italy (1980), France (1984), FRG (1988), Sweden (1992), Great Britain (1996), the Netherlands (2000) and Portugal (2004). In 2008 the contest will be held in Austria and Switzerland. The current Europe champion is team of Greece that reached a sensational success in 2004 in Portugal.

In the presentation of submission of the Ukrainian application for the participation Presidents of Ukraine and Poland -Viktor Yushenko and Lekh Kachinsky, prominent Ukrainian and Polish football players Andriy Shevchenko and Yezhy Dudek, Ukrainian boxer Vitaly Klichko and others took part.

It should be admitted that according to the tender submission the opening ceremony of EURO-2012 is planned to have place in Warsaw, but final match will be held in Ukraine. The matches will be held in Kyiv, Lviv, Dontesk and Dnipropetrovsk, and Polish cities as Warsaw, Vrotslav, Gdansk and Poznan’. The Ukrainian cities as Kharkiv and Odesa are in support, from the Polish side these are Krakiv and Khozhuv. The supporting cities will be used in EURO-2012 in the case of problems with readiness of the main cities, as well as in the case of possible increase in number of participants of the Championship from 16 to 24 teams.

It should be forecasted that for this period leasing of Ukrainian property will be significantly increased due to the real rush of tourists to the cities mentioned above. Kyiv and others cities will have probably thousands of foreign tourists and people from different regions of our country wishing to attend this very important event and to rent Ukrainian real estate!