France selects 12 cities in Euro 2016 bid

(WFI) France selects the 12 cities in its bid for the UEFA Euro 2016 championships.

Stadiums in Bordeaux, Lens, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nancy, Nice, Paris, Saint-Denis, Saint-Etienne, Strasbourg and Toulouse would used if the country beats off competition from Italy, Turkey and a joint bid from Norway-Sweden to stage the 2016 tournament.

New stadiums are planned for Nice, Bordeaux, Lyon and Lille, while the other cities bar Paris would revamp existing venues. The 80,000-seat Stade de France in the French capital would not require any significant refurbishment.

Of the 12, nine will be used for matches with the others earmarked as back-ups. UEFA’s flagship tournament will be expanded from 16 to 24 teams after Poland-Ukraine’s co-hosting of the 2012 edition.

The French FA rejected applications from Metz and Montpellier; Rennes and Nantes had expressed interest until withdrawing due to financial concerns.

France's junior sports minister Rama Yade welcomed the twelve cities selected by the French FA at the announcement ceremony in Paris on Wednesday.

She said the stadium projects were of high quality and would provide a boost to French football. Yade added that the four new stadiums would be exceptional and gave assurances over the government’s financial support and determination to win the right to host the competition.

Yade urged French football leaders to use the announcement of the candidate cities as a stepping stone in the bid campaign. Remarking that the stadiums were the linchpins of the candidacies, she said, “but it’s an entire city, an entire department, a region that must be its soul”.

Last month, Italy named the 12 cities in its Euro 2016 bid. Bari, Bologna, Cagliari, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Turin, Udine and Verona would be used for the 2016 edition, which will be the first to include 24 teams. New stadiums for Juventus and AS Roma are among those planned.

In July, the Norway-Sweden bid confirmed their candidate cities. Norway offers Lillestrom, Oslo, Stavanger and Trondheim, with the Swedish locations being Gothenburg, Helsingborg, Malmo, Solna and Stockholm.

France, which staged the 1984 tournament, and its bid rivals must present their bid dossiers to UEFA by Feb. 15. A UEFA commission will then evaluate the bid books before preparing written evaluation reports for submission to the UEFA National Team Competitions Committee.

The UEFA Executive Committee will decide the 2016 host nation at the end of May.

With reporting from Mark Bisson

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