Russia’s St. Petersburg ready to host next year UEFA Champions League and Euro Cup matches

MOSCOW, April 14. /TASS/. Russia’s second-largest city of St. Petersburg will have enough time to readjust in its preparations for the UEFA Euro Cup matches after the final game of the 2021 UEFA Champions League, Alexei Sorokin, the head of the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) Russia-2020, said on Tuesday. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) announced on March 17 a decision to postpone the 2020 UEFA Euro Cup for exactly one year as a preventive measure against the ongoing global spread of COVID-19. The championship was rescheduled for June 11-July 11, 2021. Russia’s St. Petersburg is among the 12 cities in Europe that were selected to host the European championship’s matches. It is also the venue of the final match of the UEFA Champions League in late May. "The overall configuration system certainly remains unchanged," Sorokin said speaking in an interview with Russia’s Rossiya-24 television channel. "We will do our best preserving all initially registered limits, only trying to move them in the right direction." "We are now faced with the fact of the organization of the final match of the Champions League in St. Petersburg, not long before the start of the Euro Cup that was also scheduled to be held in St. Petersburg," Sorokin continued. "This is certainly a challenge, but we will adjust our planning taking into account this tournament, which is extremely important for UEFA and the whole society of clubs’ tournaments." "Two week-period is not much but it is enough to readjust the stadium and the city for hosting the new tournament," Sorokin said. "We will surely need to do the rebranding, replace the decorations in the city, since we are faced with the clear-cut obligations that say the host city must be living it to the full with the Champions League final match," he continued. "We all witnessed this phenomenon in Moscow in 2008 as well as in other host cities of the [Champions League] final matches." "This two-week period is not much, but at the same time there is certainty that all involved parties will cope with this task in the end," he added. The matches of the 2020 Euro Cup were initially scheduled to be held at stadiums in 12 different cities across Europe, namely in London (England), Munich (Germany), Rome (Italy), Baku (Azerbaijan), St. Petersburg (Russia), Bucharest (Romania), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Dublin (Ireland), Bilbao (Spain), Budapest (Hungary), Glasgow (Scotland) and Copenhagen (Denmark) between June 12 and July 12, 2020. A decision to hold the 2020 Euro Cup, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, in various European countries instead of in one or two hosting countries was made at the UEFA Executive Committee’s meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, on December 6, 2012. Russia’s second largest city of St. Petersburg was granted the right to host three group stage matches and one of the quarterfinals of the 2020 UEFA Euro Cup. The newly built football arena in St. Petersburg hosted the opening and final matches of the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup and also served as one of 12 stadiums across the country hosting matches of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The over 62,300-seat capacity stadium was laid down in the western part of Krestovsky Island in St. Petersburg in 2007 and commissioned in early 2017. It serves as a home stadium for Zenit St. Petersburg football club. In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus — named COVID-19 by the WHO — have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia. On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 1,970,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 124,900 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 465,500 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe. To date, a total of 21,102 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 1,694 patients having recovered from the virus. Russia’s latest data indicates 170 fatalities nationwide. Earlier, the Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation. Read more