UEFA should take ALL the blame for hell of Baku final
ThE identity of the Europa League quarter- finalists was known on Thursday, March 14. By the following evening, UEFA should have been able to announce the venue for the final. Somewhere reachable, somewhere the fans could enjoy. Not Baku. Nowhere remote or inhospitable. Nowhere prohibitively expensive.
There are 18 countries and 1,725 miles between the points UEFA could have chosen from. They are lying when they say the woe of Baku and back is not on them.
By the time the round of 16 concluded, UEFA knew the area covered by the quarter-finalists. It ranged from Lisbon in the west to Prague in the east, London in the north to Naples in the south. And at that point, UEFA knew that the nearest Baku would be to any of the possible finalists was 2,227 miles away.
Slavia Prague were then knocked out. Even so, had UEFA already decreed that the final was being held in Vienna, say, 156 miles from the Czech capital, there would be no argument whoever ended up there.
Vienna is approachable. So is
most of Germany, Spain and France — and these are all countries with stadium options. It should not take close to two years to find a venue for a final.
Yet Baku was chosen on September 20, 2017. We already know the venue for the 2020 final: Gdansk in Poland. This month we will discover who hosts in 2021: Tbilisi in Georgia, or Seville.
And for what? So UEFA can conjure up some branding and a meaningless slogan.
‘Together to Baku’ is the one for this year. Yet who is together to Baku, considering the limitations of the venue? Together in a car, six hours from Tbilisi maybe. Together via Istanbul. Together watching from the sofa because tickets are so scarce.
The qualifying teams, Arsenal and Chelsea, have been told they will get only 6,000 seats each in a 68,700- capacity stadium, and this is now being blamed on the main airport being able to handle only 15,000 visitors a day. And UEFA found that out now? Of course not.
One of the advantages of a two-year lead time is the compilation of evaluation reports; detailed analyses of venue logistics, including international transportation. Meaning UEFA knew of Baku’s flaws and the unavoidable restrictions on tickets, but ignored them.
They probably figured that once the final was taken so far east, the numbers travelling would be significantly down anyway.
The only argument for holding finals in remote locations concern inclusion. Azerbaijan is part of UEFA, too. Why shouldn’t it get a little gravy? And that much is true. Yet the final venue should
play sympathetically to the needs of supporters.
This year, Krasnodar and Zenit St Petersburg from Russia were in the Europa League’s last 16. Had either got through, most of eastern Europe could have been considered among the options for a final, even Moscow.
And yes, Arsenal and Chelsea to Moscow would still have been a trek. Yet there would have been more than 6,000 tickets each at the end of it, and flights and entry routes would have been less problematic.
This is a final constructed with the least thought, even for the playing participants, given that it has now been revealed that Henrikh Mkhitaryan of Arsenal might not be able to get a visa, due to Armenia’s war footing with Azerbaijan.
How could UEFA award such a fixture to a city without first establishing that all players would be able to gain access? That alone should have been a red flag in 2017 — or at least sorted out months ago when it was clear that Arsenal’s presence in the final was very possible. Azerbaijan has lots of lovely oil money and, looking back, this has been on the agenda since UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin took the job. He floated the idea in his first major interview, in 2016 when discussing potential final venues.
‘To go from Portugal to Azerbaijan, for example, is almost the same or the same as if you go to New York,’ he said. ‘For the fans it’s no problem.’
AT THE time, the headlines were about UEFA taking the Champions League final to the American continent — and that will come if the elite clubs get their way, don’t worry — but we all missed Baku as a prior staging post. You’ve got to love that ‘no problem’, too. There speaks a man who hasn’t worried about the cost of watching football in decades.
Ask Arsenal or Chelsea’s fans if Baku is no problem. OK, two years too late, but it might inform the decision over Tbilisi in 2021.
It is a myth that UEFA, or any remotely competent organisaalways
tion, cannot organise an event in two months. If they go the distance, baseball’s post-season play- offs are completed two or three days before the World Series begins.
In 2012, the San Francisco Giants played the St Louis Cardinals for the National League pennant on Monday, October 22. Having won, the World Series opened with the Giants facing the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday, October 24. Yet the Tigers could just as easily have been playing in St Louis that day.
San Francisco and St Louis are 2,051 miles apart, and while Detroit to St Louis is 532 miles, San Francisco is 2,393 miles away. And yet it gets done. Travel is organised, tickets are sold, branding is designed — and the whole process is completed in 48 hours.
And no, because of the often enormous distances involved, baseball does not have the tradition of away support that exists in football. Yet there are still a few hardy souls who make the trip — and between two days and two years, there is surely middle ground. It’s called March.