Euro 2012 - The Best European Football - Opens June 8 with Games in Two Locales

    LONDON, ENGLAND, May 03, 2012 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The next month is a good opportunity to check out the William Hill Euro 2012 page and to gather the information you'll need to choose your team and place your wager. When you do your Euro betting, 2012 is the year to place your wagers on William Hill, the outstanding online sports betting site.

EURO 2012 opens on June 8 with fantastic football guaranteed throughout the month. More than just another exciting football tournament, the 2012 UEFA Football Championship will have the undivided attention of football fans the world over. Second only to the World Cup in significance, Euro 2012 will be watched by millions who have spent the last four years waiting for this moment. Euro 2012 will be hosted by both Poland and Ukraine, and it will run from June 8 to July 1.

Euro 2008, held in Austria and Switzerland, was won by Spain, which went on to win the World Cup in 2010. This makes Spain the clear favourite going into Euro 2012, although no team can be ruled out as a contender.

UEFA - the Union of European Football Associations - is the governing body of European football and Euro 2012 is the culmination of 15 months of intense elimination rounds, involving 51 national teams. These qualifications rounds began in August 2010 and wound up in November 2011, leaving 16 countries in the finals. Of note is the fact that this will be the last time that 16 nations will be represented in the European Championship; from 2016, there will be 24 teams. The venue for Euro 2012 was chosen more than five years ago, in April 2007. Only twice before have two countries jointly hosted the European Championship: Switzerland and Austria in 2008, and Belgium and the Netherlands in 2000.

The UEFA European Championship games date back to 1960 when the first Euro tournament was help in France. At that point it was known as the European Nations' Cup. Those games were a considerably more modest affair, with only four teams (out of 17 countries who participated in the qualifying rounds) vying for the title. Host France competed against Russia, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, with the Russians walking away with the crown. Twenty years later - in Euro '80 - the format changed to an eight-team competition. The format changed once again in Euro '96, in England, when 16 teams competed in four groups made up of four teams each. This is the current format, although, as mentioned, it is slated to change again when it expands to 24 teams in Euro 2016.

With Poland and Ukraine hosting Euro 2012, the world will become more familiar with some fairly well-known Eastern European cities, like Warsaw, Wroclaw and Gdansk (in Poland) and Kiev and Lviv (in Ukraine). Alongside these venues, however, are lesser-known sites, such as, Poznan, Poland, and Donetsk and Kharkiv, Ukraine. In all eight host cities, stadiums have either been built from scratch or have undergone extensive renovations to meet the stringent UEFA requirements. In addition, transportation infrastructure - roads, public transport, airport terminals - had to be brought to a level that will allow the thousands of visitors to navigate the matches with ease. More than 95% of the tickets to Euro 2012 have been sold at this point. However, about 50,000 tickets are still available.

Mere weeks stand between football fans and the launch of Euro 2012. The opening ceremony takes place in the Warsaw National Stadium at 4 pm local time, followed by the first Group A match-up between Poland and Greece. The excitement concludes on July 1, in the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, where the Euro 2012 champion will be determined.

Best UK Casinos is an online web portal featuring an elaborate selection of the to UK casinos available on the internet.

# # #