Post by caspday on Dec 9, 2012 22:03:13 GMT -5
To his critics, it will be seen as using Jay Cutler Jersey one bad call to justify another. To his supporters, a typically innovative stroke of Gallic genius. Michel Platini's brainwave of spreading the 2020 European Championship thinly across the continent, confirmed by Uefa's executive at a meeting in Lausanne, was partly explained on Wholesale NFL Jerseys the basis that an expanded 24-team tournament would be too expensive for one nation to host alone.The financially and politically driven decision to expand the field to 24 teams, to be employed for the first time in Platini's native France in 2016, has resulted in a situation Jay Cutler Elite Jersey where many European countries judge it just too costly to host. They have viewed the austere landscape, the gloomy economic prognosis for the Eurozone and the travails of Poland and the Ukraine last summer, and concluded it is just not worth it."It will be a lot easier from a financial perspective for all the countries," said Uefa's general secretary, Gianni Infantino. "If you need to build airports or 10 stadiums in a country, this would be rather Wholesale Nike NFL Jerseys easy because it would be one stadium per host city." So rather than finding a way to make the tournament work in a single country, Uefa has turned logic on its head and will use the whole of Europe as its playground to host an expanded one.Abandoning the 16-team format Brian Urlacher Jersey that most agree works so well in delivering competitive China Wholesale Jerseys matches at every stage of the tournament in favour of an alternative that will see almost half of Uefa's membership qualifying for the finals was one of a number of bold steps that Platini, below, has taken recently that reflect his consolidated power base and thirst for revolution. Since securing another four-year term as Uefa president in February last year, Platini's desire to shake things up has intensified.He has defended his Brian Urlacher Elite Jersey decision to vote for Russia and Qatar to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, but argued for the latter to be moved to winter. He has taken control of marketing the TV rights for all European international qualifiers and pressed on with his Financial Fair Play plan to try and bring some sanity to football's overheated finances – all the while increasing the power and influence of the president's office.The move is also perhaps a sign that the NFL Wholesale Jerseys bidding gravy train which has powered the growth and greased the wheels of major continental and international sports federations for the last two decades is juddering to a halt. The major reason that Platini dreamed up his "Euro for Europe", ostensibly to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the championship, was that Turkey was the only country to put a serious bid forward.With an alternative plan to host the 2020 Olympics in Istanbul also under consideration, and Turkish football reeling from a major match-fixing scandal, Platini reached for a solution that rips up the handbook and will have airlines cheering, if not nfl bears jerseys for sale travelling fans. The format and the number of cities that will host matches will now have to be hammered out. The devil will be in the detail but even the broad strokes will be enough to anger some.The move will fundamentally alter the character of international football tournaments that give or take various format tweaks, have largely continued on a single-country basis since the first World Cup in Uruguay in 1930. No federation has ever attempted nflbearsjerseysforsale.com to host a tournament across more than two countries – and Fifa resolved never to do so again after the problems it encountered with Japan and South Korea in 2002. There will be a mascot and a logo, but how else will the tournament have any unique character? It said in a statement: "Fifa will be BE1210ZYH requested to issue relevant worldwide regulations prohibiting third-party ownership of players. Uefa, through its Professional Football Strategy Council, would also be ready to implement a regulatory framework to prohibit third-party ownership arrangements in Uefa competitions, should Fifa not take the appropriate steps."