The football championships of Europe and the world alternate with each other, therefore, the finals of one of these two most important events in the football world take place every two years. 2012 ends the cycle allotted to the European Championship - in the summer the best team of the old world will be determined by games in two Eastern European countries.
The European Championship is held in several stages and begins with qualifying games, in which all participating teams are divided into groups. This stage lasted more than a year - from August 11, 2010 to November 15, 2011 - and out of 51 European teams left only 9 group winners, one best team that took second place and 4 winners of play-offs played by the rest of the teams that ended up second in groups.
The final part of the European Championship, after an almost seven-month break, will begin this summer in two countries - Poland and Ukraine. On June 8, it starts at the Warsaw National Stadium with the opening ceremony, and at 20:00 Moscow time, the first match of the group stage of the final part will also take place there. It will host the national teams from Group A - Poland and Greece. Almost three hours later, the Russian national team will also play their first game - in Wroclaw they will play with the Czech team. The first game on the territory of Ukraine will take place the next day - on June 9, two representatives of Group B, the national teams of the Netherlands and Denmark, will play in Kharkov.
The group stage will last 11 days, during which each team will have three meetings. On June 19, 8 teams will be announced, for which this championship will end, and the rest will play quarterfinals from June 21 to 24 - one meeting will take place on each of the four days. The semi-finals will take place on June 27 and 28 in Donbass and Warsaw.
The most important game of the entire two-year cycle will take place on July 1, 2012 in Kiev. The meeting of the two finalists of the European Championship will take place at the Olimpiyskiy National Sports Center, the largest sports facility for the final part of the competition. Upon completion of it, the presentation of the main awards of Euro 2012 will take place. The final part of the Old World Championship will last 24 days, and in total, it will take one year, five months and 22 days to identify the European champion from the first qualifying game of the cycle to its final.
