Euro 2020: Football's coming home as Uefa award Wembley semi-finals and finals for Euros
Wembley beat off competition from Munich's Allianz Arena and will host the 2020 European Championship final
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Your support makes all the difference.Wembley will host the 2020 European Championships semi-finals and final after Uefa awarded the home of football the honour to host the three biggest matches of the tournament.
England’s national stadium beat off competition from Munich’s Allianz Arena, with just the German city rivalling London for the right to host the 13th and final package that Uefa would award.
FA chairman Greg Dyke was joined by general secretary Alex Horne, England manager Roy Hodgson and the sports minister Helen Grant for the announcement in Geneva, where it was confirmed that Wembley would host the Euro 202 final as well as the two semi-final that must be played in the same city.
Uefa president Michel Platini announced that Wembley would hold the biggest matches of the tournament along with the 12 other venues that will host matches.
After announcing Wembley as the hosts for the final, Platini confirmed that Munich, Baku, St Petersburg and Rome will hold three group games each plus a quarter-final. Copenhagen, Bucharest, Amsterdam and Dublin’s Aviva Stadium were awarded a last-16 tie each along with three group matches.
Glasgow’s Hampden Park, Bilbao, Budapest and Brussels were awarded the final four last-16 matches and three group games each to complete the line-up, meaning Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium missed out altogether.
12 other packages were announced that will see venues across Europe host matches in the first international tournament to be played across more than two separate nations. The last European Championships, held in 2012, was based across both Ukraine and Poland, and the 2000 European Championship were split between Belgium and the Netherlans, while the 2002 World Cup was shared between Japan and South Korea.
It was believed before the announcement that Germany could pull out of the running to host the semi-finals and final and support England's bid, choosing instead to focus on their campaign to host the 2024 Championships with support from the English.
The idea to stage the tournament across the continent, thought up by Uefa president Platini, is believed to be a one-off idea to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the European governing body.
Greg Dyke has also hinted that England could look to launch a bid to host the 2028 European Championships, but dismissed any chance of the FA bidding for a World Cup in he near-future after the dismal campaign failed to win the right to host the 2018 World Cup.
He told the BBC: "Obviously at some stage in the future we'd like to have the Euros and the World Cup played back in England. We won't be bidding for the World Cup in the near future.
"If we get the semi-finals and the final in 2020 I think it's unlikely we'd go for 2024 and we might well go for 2028."
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