The Business of Football at Euro 2024: Planes to Qatar, delayed trains and Chinese automobiles

Whether travel broadens or narrows the mind is one of the eternal debates, but football fans who have travelled to Germany for the European Championship this summer are learning the options are not so binary. For them, travel — or, more accurately, a lack of travel — is blowing their minds.

Certainly in the UK, generations of us have been brought up to believe the Germans were an efficient lot who were good at things such as railways.

Guess what? They are worse than us at trains! Who knew?

Well, it turns out most Germans have known that for some time. Once a source of national pride, Deutsche Bahn, Europe’s largest rail operator, has become a national joke, as years of underinvestment have taken their inevitable toll.

The host nation’s striker Niclas Fullkrug summed it up best when he spoke to reporters who had taken the train to Germany’s tournament base camp.

“Out of respect for Deutsche Bahn, I travelled one day earlier,” he successfully joked, slaying another stereotype.

Not that many England fans were laughing after Sunday’s opening group game against Serbia in Gelsenkirchen. The travel chaos after the night-time fixture prompted strong criticism from the Football Supporters’ Association.

“To see fans stranded in Gelsenkirchen’s hauptbahnhof (the city’s central station) three hours after the game has finished due to transport problems at a major tournament is quite simply ridiculous,” it said.

The English Football Association was not overly impressed, either, saying it would ensure that the fans’ feedback would be “passed on to the organisers”.

And if you are thinking this is a case of whinging Poms moaning about life abroad, you should see what the Austrian media is saying about their fans’ journey to their opener in Dusseldorf the following day.

“Euro chaos: Deutsche Bahn makes our fans tremble” is Austrian outlet OE24’s headline on a story about 1,000 fans stranded at Passau, a town on the German/Austrian border, because of uncompleted overnight repairs on the line.

This would all be marginally less embarrassing for Deutsche Bahn if the company could just keep its head down for four weeks and hope nobody really remembers who to blame for all these cancelled trains, late departures and missing carriages once they get home. Unfortunately for DB, as it is more commonly known, it is one of the tournament’s five national sponsors.

Markus Hock, program manager of DB during Euro 2024, outside Hamburg’s central station (Marcus Brandt/picture alliance via Getty Images)

And it is not as if DB’s patchy reliability was not flagged up by the Germans themselves when the host cities for this tournament were being chosen seven years ago.

In its selection process, the German FA ranked the 14 candidate cities in 10 different, weighted categories, which included the quality of their stadiums and their plan for promoting the event. After a decent venue, which was worth 25 per cent of the total score, the second most important requirement was good transport links.

Dusseldorf and Gelsenkirchen were both in the bottom half of the transport ranking, with rejected bidders Bremen in 12th and Monchengladbach last.

Leipzig was picked despite ranking 13th, which does not bode well for the thousands of Dutch and French fans who will be making their way east for Friday night’s game there between those two sides.

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Deutsche Bahn is not the only sponsor raising eyebrows, if not expectations, at this tournament.

Visit Qatar, the Gulf state’s tourism agency, is one of Euro 2024’s 13 global sponsors and is using its space in the shop window to encourage European football fans to “make Qatar your stopover” when flying to Asia, presumably instead of neighbouring Dubai.

The campaign features prominently on the big screens across all of the Euros’ giant fan zones and Visit Qatar is “the presenting partner” of UEFA’s free fantasy game for the tournament. There is also something called The Doha Club at the fan zones in Berlin and Munich, where you can try Arabian coffee and channel your inner Lionel Messi by donning the ceremonial bisht, like the one he was given to wear after the World Cup final in Qatar 18 months ago.

Messi wears the traditional robe while lifting the World Cup in Qatar (Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)

Whether this will be enough to make Germans forget the Qatari response to their concerns about human rights at that 2022 tournament remains to be seen. Seems like a tough sell to me.

But at least the tourism agency is trying.

On the eve of the tournament, Qatar Airways announced it had extended its partnership with UEFA, European football’s governing body and overall organiser of the Euros, to be its official airline partner for another four years. But you will not find any mention of this on the UEFA website, and Qatar Airways is not exactly doing loop-the-loops about it, either.

Another slightly unusual one is the presence of five Chinese brands among those 13 global sponsors. That is two more than the Germans themselves mustered and three more than that traditional sports-marketing powerhouse the United States.

Of course, the Euros are a global event these days, with a projected cumulative audience over the tournament’s four weeks of five billion viewers, and Chinese companies are also very keen to sell their products to Europeans.

However, it is still slightly surprising to see that Euro 2024’s automotive partner is neither Mercedes nor fellow German firm Volkswagen but BYD, China’s best-selling car brand and now the manufacturer of the world’s most popular electric vehicles (EV).

That last achievement has come despite Western governments placing huge tariffs on Chinese EV imports. In fact, two days before the start of the tournament, the European Union announced it was imposing an additional 17.4 per cent on top of the 10 per cent import duties that BYD’s European customers were already paying.

This is because the EU believes the Chinese government is unfairly subsidising its burgeoning motor industry in a bid to corner the global EV market. The U.S. government agrees and has imposed tariffs of 100 per cent.

Let us hope, for BYD’s sake, it can persuade a few visitors to Germany’s fan zones to put their (Euro 2024 beer partner) Bitburgers down for a bit, bitte, and have a look at the cars on their stands.

There are as many different ways to show just how global this event’s appeal has become as there are official partners, but a good one got some press last week when it was reported that more Euro 2024 tickets had been sold to fans based in the United States than in any other country.

It was a great line… but it was not quite true, as this factoid had been provided by Viagogo, a ticket exchange and resale site that was launched in London almost 20 years ago but is now U.S.-owned.

Full disclosure: Viagogo advertises its services on The Athletic. So apologies for the double bubble, so to speak. But the numbers are interesting.

What has actually happened is that U.S.-based fans are the No 1 buyers of tickets on the secondary market, accounting for 27 per cent of all sales, just ahead of people with German addresses.

Scotland fans have swarmed to Germany (Peng Ziyang/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Filling out the top five are Canada, the Netherlands and… Georgia (The country, we assume, not the U.S. state). And Viagogo says it has sold Euro 2024 tickets to fans from 134 nations, with an average ticket price of £285 ($361). Unsurprisingly, the final in Berlin on July 14 is the hottest ticket, with last Friday’s opening game in Munich between hosts Germany and Scotland being the second-most popular.

Third? You will never guess it, so I will tell you: Turkey versus Portugal, in Dortmund on Saturday. For those wondering, there are a lot of Turkish supporters in Germany.

In terms of the primary market, as in those who bought tickets direct from UEFA, German-based fans unsurprisingly led the way, with England second, then Germany’s near neighbours Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Suggestions that U.S.-based fans have decided it is easier to come to Germany to watch the games in person than find them on TV back home have not been confirmed.

Germans can sympathise, by the way, as most of the games here have been shared between the main broadcasters ARD, RTL and ZDF, but five have been sold exclusively to Deutsche Telekom’s (another official partner) streaming service MagentaTV. It is a decision that has gone down as well as Fox’s Fubo fiasco.

There is a lot of football to go around these days, though. Too much, according to the world’s most successful domestic leagues and the global players’ union, FIFPro.

A few days before the start of Euro 2024, FIFPro announced it was teaming up with the players’ unions from England and France to take FIFA, world football’s ruling body, to the Court of Justice for the European Union over fixture congestion.

The proverbial straw that broke their backs was FIFA’s decision to expand its Club World Cup from seven teams to 32, starting in the U.S. next summer, and then refuse to move it forward two weeks from a June/July slot so the players involved could have a fortnight off afterwards to rest for a bit before starting their next season.

So far UEFA, European football’s governing body, has managed to stay out of this particular fight, despite its own repeated attempts to fill every available gap in the match calendar with more football. After all, even this tournament used to involve just four teams, then eight (in 1980), then 16 (1996), before adding eight more in 2016.

Ceferin salutes the crowd at Spain’s game against Croatia (James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)

There are two main reasons why UEFA has managed to stay out of the firing line. The first is money, obviously. UEFA shares most of the £13billion it makes every four-year cycle with the clubs. It is even giving them more than £200m from Euro 2024’s income as compensation for letting their players appear in the tournament.

But the second is that UEFA at least pretends to listen to the leagues and players’ union, whereas FIFA… erm, not so much.

And this is why UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin broke his vow of silence on Monday to confirm, “in a further display of the reinforced spirit of cooperation between UEFA and FIFPro Europe”, that he had met the union in the German city of Stuttgart the previous day.

According to the related media release, which was mercifully short, “many important topics were discussed, including key aspects of football’s governance, player workload trends and the development of women’s football”.

The key action point from the meeting was the creation of a “new player-specific forum… to discuss important topics with UEFA on a bilateral basis”. There were some more words, but you get the gist.

The important point here is that UEFA is showing it does consult its “stakeholders”, so please do not take us to court.

There was no mention of how Ceferin got to Stuttgart, by the way. Bet he didn’t take the train.

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(Top photo: Reinaldo Coddou H./Getty Images)