Germany will host the Euro 2024, Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin said on Thursday following a vote by the executive committee of European football’s ruling body.
Germany and Turkey were the only candidates to stage the 24-team tournament.
Berlin’s Olympic Stadium will host the final, with a total of 51 games scheduled for up to 32 days in June and July. The nine other cities that will be used for games are Cologne, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich and Stuttgart.
“The procedure was transparent, the vote was democratic. Every democratic decision is the right decision,” Ceferin said.
“We have amazing stadiums, fans who love football, first and foremost we have people who love celebrating with other Europeans,” said former Germany captain Philipp Lahm, an ambassador for the German bid.
“We will organise a huge football party in Germany.”
This is Turkey’s fourth defeat in the last five Euro bidding races and it had been hoping to mark the republic’s 100th anniversary in 2024 by staging its first major international football tournament.
But while Germany’s hotel stock, stadiums and transport infrastructure are all in place and of high quality, Turkey’s bid was marked down for needing to upgrade airports, railways, roads and stadiums, particularly at a time when its economy is struggling. The country’s poor human-rights record was also flagged up by a Uefa evaluation report.
The announcement came as Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Berlin Thursday for a three-day state visit designed to thaw some of the tension between the two countries, who have been at loggerheads in recent years. Turkey accuses Germany of of harbouring plotters of a failed military coup against him in 2016.
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