Poland and Greece will set the ball rolling for the 14th edition of the tournament on June 8.
The 14th edition of the European football tournament, Euro 2012, will kick off on Friday June 8 in Warsaw with an encounter between co-host Poland and Greece. The opening ceremony will also comprise a 12-minute show which will combine tradition and innovation to emphasise the historic nature of the event, which is the first in central and east Europe. It will also include a wonderful choreography, to be performed by more than 800 volunteer artists, coming from 63 countries. It is estimated that over 150 million people will watch the ceremony and the opening match.
The tournament features 16 nations, the last European Championship to do so as from Euro 2016 onward, there will be 24 finalists. Qualification was contested by 51 nations between August 2010 and November 2011 to join the two host nations in the tournament. The winner of the tournament gains automatic entry to the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup hosted by Brazil. The joint Poland–Ukraine bid was chosen by a vote of the UEFA Executive Committee at a meeting in Cardiff on 18 April 2007, defeating both Italy and a Croatia–Hungary bid. Eight cities were selected by UEFA as host venues. In a return to the format used at Euro 1992, Euro 1996 and Euro 2008, each of the four groups will be based around two stadiums each. The host cities Warsaw, Gdańsk, Wrocław, Poznań, Kiev, Lviv are all popular tourist destinations, unlike Donetsk and Kharkiv (the latter having replaced Dnipropetrovsk as a host city in 2009).
Fixtures:
Group One: Ukraine, Poland, Spain, Netherlands.
Group Two: Germany, Italy, England, Russia.
Group Three: Croatia, Greece, Portugal, Sweden
Group Four: Denmark, France, Czech Republic, Ireland
