Austria and Switzerland will stage the European soccer championship in 2008, Europe's governing body UEFA announced yesterday.
There were seven bids to stage the world's second most important soccer tournament after the World Cup -- Austria and Switzerland, Greece and Turkey, Scotland and Ireland, Bosnia and Croatia, a four-way Nordic candidature, plus solo bids from Russia and Hungary.
The joint bid from Austria and Switzerland had been considered the favorite.
After months of lobbying, gathering sponsorship and drawing up proposals, seven hopefuls were to have discovered yesterday which of them will host the 2008 European Championship.
A joint bid by Austria and Switzerland and a proposal from four Nordic nations were the front-runners, with a Scotland-Ireland bid also seen as a strong contender.
Russia and Hungary each made individual bids, while Croatia was applying jointly with Bosnia-Herzegovina and longtime-enemies Greece and Turkey also submitted a bid together.
``We have done what we can, and now its up to others to decide,'' said Karen Espelund, general secretary of the Norwegian Football Association, which is part of the Nordic bid along with Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
``We have a chance. We have a real chance. We are going to have a pretty nervous time,'' said David Taylor, chairman of the Scotland-Ireland bid committee.
Members of the seven bids made 15-minute presentations to UEFA on Wednesday in their final attempt to sway the vote of the executive committee members.
``We told them `we'll build the house and you bring the party,''' said Friedrich Stickler, head of the Austrian Football Association.
Each bid already produced hundreds of pages of detailed technical information on how they would conduct the tournament if selected.
The executive committee narrowed down the number of bidders to two or three before moving to a final vote.
The European Championship was jointly hosted for the first time in 2000 in Belgium and the Netherlands. The experiment was repeated this year for the World Cup finals which took place in Japan and South Korea. Euro 2004 will take place in Portugal.
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