There will be no Euro football match at the San Mamés stadium in Bilbao, Basque organizers said on the evening of Wednesday April 21, after having received a letter from the team a few hours earlier. Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), which announced the withdrawal of the host city.
Bilbao was one of the twelve cities to have been selected by UEFA to host matches in the continental competition, scheduled from June 11 to July 11, 2021, but the too strict sanitary conditions imposed by the municipality to guarantee the presence of the public have pushed back the European body of the round ball.
UEFA, which is due to announce the final list of cities for the competition on Friday, wants the stadiums to be 25% full, which could also exclude Munich and Dublin.
“It will be too soon”
Irish Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Wednesday that such a hypothesis would be confirmed: “We’re just very careful about it (…), we just think that in June it will be too early ”, he thus made known.
Two weeks ago, Ireland had already notified UEFA that it could not commit to a minimum occupancy rate. The Aviva Stadium in Dublin would normally host three Group E matches (Poland-Slovakia on June 14, Sweden-Slovakia on June 18 and Sweden-Poland on June 23) as well as a round of 16.
But the Republic of Ireland, where 4,847 people have died after being infected with SARS-CoV-2, remains committed to fairly strict anti-Covid measures.
The other host cities that are Budapest, Saint Petersburg, Baku, Amsterdam, Bucharest, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Rome and London have, for their part, all promised gauges between 25% and 100%.
