UEFA EURO 2012

The 2012 UEFA European Championship, the 14th UEFA organized European championship for national teams, will be held in Poland and Ukraine from 8 June to 1 July 2012. It is furthermore the last competition of its sort for now with only sixteen participating teams, as UEFA has decided to increase the number of joining teams up to twenty-four. 

The history of European championships goes back into the first half of the last century:

Championships for national associations had already begun in other continents by the time the idea of a European competition for national teams began to reach fruition in the 1950s. At the time that UEFA was born, in 1954, the impulse for a European championship was coming from the distinguished French sports newspaper L'Equipe, which proposed a competition with home-and-away matches to be played in midweek in the evening.

Adding to the French drive for such a tournament was Henri Delaunay, first UEFA General Secretary and former French national association general secretary. In 1927, Delaunay had already submitted a proposal to FIFA for the creation of a European cup, to run concurrently with the World Cup, which would involve a qualifying competition every two years.

In 2007, UEFA allocated the 14th European Championship to Poland and Ukraine that defeated an Italian as well as a Hungarian-Croatian bid for the holding of this year's edition of the most popular continental football competition for national teams.

UEFA has selected an amount of eight venue cities that are awaiting a minimum of three matches each including Warsaw and Kyiv as the venues for the opener match respectively the final. Wroclaw, Poznán, Gdansk and the Ukrainian cities Donezk, Lviv and Kharkiv are completing the list of the hosting venue cities.

In addition to this, all the big names will attend the competition, including 2008's winners Spain, the 2010 World Cup finalists from the Netherlands and also Germany, the nation with the most titles in European Championships (3). 

68 match officials have been selected by UEFA to bolster the provision of a fantastic tournament to the world that are basically made up of twelve quintets including the main referee, two assistant referees and two additional assistant referees all coming from the same nation each. Moreover, four fourth officials and four reserve assistant referees will attend the tournament.

This blog and its community will follow this tournament by reporting on the match officials' performances and discussing their appointments.

In addition, everything related to the upcoming first referee appointments can be posted underneath this thread until no separate thread is available.
Check these officials and their profiles (still to come) and find a tournament overview including referee observation reports by following the below posted link.

UEFA EURO 2012