The Business of Football at Euro 2024: Plan to Qatar, delayed trains and Chinese cars

Whether travel broadens or narrows the mind is one of those eternal debates, but soccer fans who have traveled to Germany for the Euros this summer are learning that the options are not so binary. For them, travel – or, more accurately, lack of travel – blows their minds.

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

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

Well, it turns out that most Germans have known 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.

Host nation striker Niclas Fullkrug summed it up best when speaking to reporters who had taken the train to Germany’s tournament base camp.

“Out of respect for Deutsche Bahn, I left a day early,” he joked successfully, killing another stereotype.

Not many England fans were laughing after Sunday’s opening group stage match against Serbia in Gelsenkirchen. The travel chaos after the night match drew strong criticism from the Football Supporters’ Association.

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

The FA was also not overly impressed, saying it would ensure fans’ feedback would be “passed on to the organisers”.

And if you think this is a case of whiny Poms moaning about life abroad, you should see what Austrian media are saying about their fans’ trip to their premiere in Düsseldorf the following day.

“Eurochaos: Deutsche Bahn makes our fans tremble” is Austria’s OE24’s headline on a story about 1,000 fans stranded in Passau, a city on the German-Austrian border, due to unfinished overnight repairs on the line.

All of this would be marginally less embarrassing for Deutsche Bahn if the company could just keep its head down for four weeks and hope that no one really remembers who is to blame for all those canceled 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.

And it’s not as if DB’s spotty reliability wasn’t flagged up by the Germans themselves when the host cities for this tournament were chosen seven years ago.

In its selection process, the German Football Association ranked the 14 candidate cities in 10 different, weighted categories, which included the quality of their stadiums and their plan to promote the event. After a decent venue, which was worth 25 percent of the total score, the second most important requirement was good communications.

Düsseldorf and Gelsenkirchen were both in the bottom half of the transport rankings, with rejected bidders Bremen in 12th place and Mönchengladbach last.

Leipzig were selected despite being ranked 13, which does not bode well for the thousands of Dutch and French fans who will make their way east for Friday night’s match there between these 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 window space to encourage European soccer fans to “make Qatar your stopover” when flying to Asia, presumably instead of neighboring Dubai.

The campaign features prominently on the big screens in all of the Euros’ giant fan zones and Visit Qatar is the ‘presenting partner’ of UEFA’s free-to-play fantasy games for the tournament. There’s also something called The Doha Club in the Berlin and Munich fan zones, where you can try Arabic coffee and channel your inner Lionel Messi by donning the ceremonial beast, like the one he had to wear after the World Cup final in Qatar 18 months ago.

Whether this will be enough to make the Germans forget Qatar’s response to their human rights concerns at that tournament in 2022 remains to be seen. Sounds like a tough sell to me.

But the tourist office is trying anyway.

On the eve of the tournament, Qatar Airways announced that it has extended its partnership with UEFA, European football’s governing body and overall organizer of the European Championship, to be its official airline partner for a further four years. But you won’t find anything about this on UEFA’s website, and Qatar Airways isn’t exactly loop-the-loops about it either.

Another somewhat unusual one is the presence of five Chinese brands among these 13 global sponsors. That’s two more than the Germans themselves mustered and three more than the traditional sports marketing powerhouse in the United States.

Of course, the Euros are a global event these days, with an estimated 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’s still a little surprising to see that Euro 2024’s car partner is neither Mercedes nor fellow German company Volkswagen, but BYD, China’s best-selling car brand and now the world’s most popular electric vehicle (EV) maker.

The latest achievement has come despite Western governments slapping huge tariffs on Chinese electric car imports. In fact, two days before the tournament started, the European Union announced that it was imposing an additional 17.4 percent on top of the 10 percent import duties that BYD’s European customers were already paying.

This is because the EU believes that the Chinese government is unfairly subsidizing its growing car industry in an attempt to put an end to the global electric car market. The US government agrees and has imposed 100 percent tariffs.

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

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There are as many different ways to show how global this event’s appeal has become as there are official partners, but one good way received press last week when it was reported that more Euro 2024 tickets had been sold to fans based in the US than anywhere else country.

It was a great line … but it wasn’t quite true, as this fact had been provided by Viagogo, a ticket exchange and resale site launched in London almost 20 years ago but now owned by the US.

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

What has actually happened is that US-based fans are the first buyers of tickets on the secondary market, accounting for 27 percent of all sales, just ahead of people with German addresses.

Rounding out the top five are Canada, the Netherlands and… Georgia (The country, we assume, not the US state). And Viagogo says it has sold Euro 2024 tickets to fans from 134 countries, 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 match in Munich between hosts Germany and Scotland the second most popular.

Third? You’ll never guess it, so I’ll tell you: Turkey vs. Portugal, in Dortmund on Saturday. For those wondering, there are many Turkish supporters in Germany.

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

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

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

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However, there is plenty of football to go around these days. Too much, according to the world’s most successful domestic leagues and the global players’ union, FIFPro.

Days before the start of Euro 2024, FIFPro announced it is working with the players’ unions from England and France to take FIFA, world football’s governing body, before the European Court of Justice for match 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 USA next summer, then refusing to move it forward two weeks from a June/July time so that they the players involved could have two weeks off afterwards to get some rest before the start of the 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 fixture calendar with more football. After all, even this tournament used to involve only four teams, then eight (1980), then 16 (1996), before adding eight in 2016.

There are two main reasons why UEFA has managed to stay out of the firing line. The first is money, of course. UEFA shares most of the £13 billion it earns every four-year cycle with the clubs. It even gives them more than £200m from Euro 2024 revenue as compensation for allowing their players to appear at the tournament.

But the other thing is that UEFA at least pretends to listen to the leagues and players union, while FIFA… erm, not so much.

And that is why UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin broke his vow of silence on Monday to confirm, “in a further demonstration of the strengthened 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 brief, “many important topics were discussed, including key aspects of football’s governance, player load 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 a few more words, but you get the gist.

The important point here is that UEFA shows they are consulting their “stakeholders”, so please don’t take us to court.

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

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