Germany beat Turkey for right to host Euro 2024

NYON, Switzerland: Germany on Thursday won the race to host the 2024 European Championship as UEFA backed a bid seen as safer than a rival proposal from Turkey.

Politics, national unity and respect for human rights in Turkey emerged as key themes in the campaign to host Europe’s premier international football event.

In the end the result was not close: Germany, which had been the favourite, won the vote among UEFA’s executive committee members by a margin of 12-4, with one abstention.

UEFA considered that the German bid already had everything in place to host a successful event -- from stadiums to infrastructure and hotels.

“We will do our utmost to live up to our expectations,” German Football Association (DFB) president Reinhard Grindel said after the winner was announced at UEFA’s lakeside Swiss headquarters.

Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, but has never staged the Euro as a unified country: West Germany hosted the competition in 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall came down. Thursday’s win also offers a boost to German football after a disastrous 2018 World Cup, when the country failed to qualify for the last 16 -- after winning the tournament in 2014.

European football’s governing body has also said it wants to make as much money as possible from the 2024 tournament and Germany was considered the better financial bet.

The German bid, which sees matches spread over 10 stadiums, has the capacity to sell 2.78 million tickets -- nearly 300,000 more than Turkey.

But Germany did not just pitch itself as a steady hand that can host a lucrative tournament without a hitch -- it has also voiced hope that a tournament on its soil could build societal unity.

After the World Cup debacle, German football was engulfed in an ugly ordeal by Arsenal star Mesut Ozil’s retirement from international football.

Ozil, born in Germany to Turkish parents, accused the DFB of racism after he was targeted with xenophobic comments for being photographed with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before the World Cup.