European Championships
The European Championships get a high level of football betting on the competition with fans across Europe placing bets on their country’s teams. Euro 2008 is just around the corner and, despite England failing to qualify, there is still expected to be huge interest with millions of pounds of bets placed on the outcome of the competition and the individual games. Betting on the European Championships (Euro 2008) offers betting on the world’s biggest international football teams.
See our full Euro 2008 Betting Guide
About the European Championships
The UEFA European Football Championship is the primary football event of the European national football teams that are members of UEFA.
The tournament has been held every four years since 1960 in the even years between World Cup Final events. Each specific tournament is usually referred to by its year such as the next event that will be ‘Euro 2008’that will be played in Austria and Switzerland.
The number of teams taking part in the tournament has grown from just four teams in 1980 to the current number of 16. National teams earn a place in the tournament through qualifying rounds and then play-off matches. For each tournament a different country acts as host and the host country qualifies automatically. Defending champions do not automatically qualify.
Qualification
To qualify teams must be either be winners or be runners-up in one of seven qualifying groups that play matches in the lead up to the event. A UEFA committee draws the qualifying groups using a seeding process. Teams are seeded based on their previous performance in the FIFA World Cup qualifying and previous European Championship qualifying rounds. Ranking is according to the number of overall points per game that each team earned.
Groups
Teams are then drawn into groups and each team plays every other team in its group twice, one home game and one away. Points are awarded for the outcome of each match and the teams are ranked according to their points. The top two teams from each group qualify for the finals.
The sixteen final teams are divided into four groups of four teams that are labeled groups A, B, C, and D. The four groups again but only one game is played against each other group member. To maintain fairness the last two matches in each group are played at exactly the same time. The winner and runner-up from each group advance to the quarterfinals after which the contest becomes a knockout event until the final between the last two remaining teams. The winning team keeps the tournament trophy for four years until the next tournament begins. In preparation for the Euro 2008 the sterling silver trophy was slightly modified making it larger and heavier.
Euro 2008
Qualifying for Euro 2008 began in 2006 and the final 16 teams are: Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Portugal, Italy, France, Greece, Turkey, Czech Republic, Germany, Croatia, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Romania, and the Netherlands.
The specification that the last two qualifying matches are played simultaneously means that a host nation must be able to provide eight suitable venues for the games to be played. Taking into consideration the strain on local transport systems by holding more than two games in the same city at the same time a host nation requires at least four cities that have the requisite facilities. There are only a few major European countries that can meet those requirements so countries are allowed to jointly host the tournament. Austria and Switzerland will jointly host Euro 2008 in June 2008. The co-host arrangement was first started in 1990 and has opened up hosting possibilities to many more countries around Europe.
Bet on the European Championships / Euro 2008 with the Euro 2008 Football Betting section at FootballBetting.net
