Ukraine and Poland, which spent billions of euros on preparations for the championship, will have to solve the same problem as Portugal, which hosted Euro 2004: what to do with colossal arenas

The emblem of the current championship is a plant with stadium flowers - a good image, a good idea by the organizers of Euro 2012, no questions asked. The question is different: when the European Championship ends, won’t expensive, ultra-modern stadiums become the “flowers of evil” for Polish and Ukrainian cities?

The Polish arenas cost the Euro organizers a total of €1.072 billion, the Ukrainian ones - €1.35 billion. The construction of the National Stadium in Warsaw, where the opening match of the Poland-Greece tournament was played, cost €478 million; approximately the same funds (€460 million) were spent on the reconstruction of the Olympic stadium in Kyiv. And the “cheapest” was the reconstruction of the City Stadium in Poznan - €187 million.

In comparison with the almost billion-dollar project cost of the new arena of the St. Petersburg Zenit, these amounts, of course, pale in comparison. But Russian construction projects are a topic for another discussion. If we compare them with the facilities built by the Portuguese for Euro 2004, then prices, of course, have increased significantly. The Portuguese did not go beyond €100 million for the stadium - and today they do not know what to do with some of them. They hoped to breathe new life into them by winning the right to host the World Cup in 2018 with the Spaniards, but lost to Russia.

The Estádio Afonso Henriques in Guimarães was modernized for Euro 2004 at a cost of €26.3 million. For a small town (160,000 people), whose residents have since filled the stands at best by a third, this is a significant amount. The city government cannot maintain the stadium. In the city of Aveiro, at the 30,000-seat Estádio Municipal, the modest Beira Mar club plays, and for the municipality this is an annual expenditure of €650,000 with no prospects for making a profit.

The multimillion-dollar reconstruction of Estádio do Bessa (out of €45 million, the state allocated only €7 million) practically killed the Boavista club from Porto, which fell into debt, was unable to acquire good players and, as they say, “slipped.” Some projects, such as the expensive Estádio Algarve in Faro (€40 million), were designed to attract tourists to the region. However, tourists, even during the Euro, did not provide income for the Portuguese: many came for one day, and sometimes even for one match, and the income at this time grew only for the owners of local bars.

Of the 10 stadiums that hosted Euro 2004 matches, only three can be called truly profitable: Estádio da Luz and Estádio José Alvalade in Lisbon and Estádio do Dragao in Porto. Big clubs play there and can fill the stands. The authorities of cities like Coimbra, Leiria, Faro or Aveiro, in turn, are forced to sort out the Europorridge, figure out how to use empty multi-thousand-seater buildings, and watch as the next plans - to open a tourist center, an exhibition center, a racing arena - fail.

Overexertion and gigantomania, when 30,000-seat stadiums were built in towns with 50,000-100,000 inhabitants, undermined the Portuguese economy and became one of the causes of the financial crisis. The state took on about 25% of the costs of constructing stadiums. After Euro 2004, an unbearable burden fell on the shoulders of municipal authorities; taxes increased, and with them prices, which negatively affected the attractiveness of Portugal for tourists. There is more and more talk about the demolition of stadiums. This, however, is problematic, and precisely because the state invested in the construction, and not just city authorities, football clubs and private investors. According to the law, objects built with state participation cannot be liquidated for 25 years.

Is the Portuguese experience important for Poles and Ukrainians? Important, perhaps, in the main way. When constructing sports facilities, an absolutely sober, rational assessment of the prospects is important. In this regard, the Portuguese are simply science fiction writers, and unscientific ones at that. From an economic point of view, Euro 2004 was a fabulous waste of money.

Neither the Poles nor the Ukrainians have, of course, yet solved the problem of paying for the stadiums built or modernized for Euro 2012. Another thing is that there are much fewer factors influencing the successful solution of the problem in Poland and Ukraine than in Portugal. By and large, there is only one factor - the functioning of local football markets, local football clubs.

The football marketing potential of Faro or Aveiro is questionable. These are towns in which the relatively stable existence of a modest club with a small stadium is possible. Lviv, Donetsk, Kharkov, Kyiv, Gdansk, Wroclaw, Poznan are large cities and quite promising football markets.

But, of course, there is cause for concern. It’s one thing to call a market promising, but quite another to make a football club a commercially successful project that can attract people to the stands. For example, the average attendance at Lech Poznan matches is just over 14,000 people, while the City Stadium, renovated at a cost of €187 million, can accommodate 41,000 spectators. 17,000 people come to the matches of Lechia Gdansk at the 43,000-seat Arena Gdansk; the 42,000-seat Wroclaw City Stadium is only half full at the matches of the local Szląsk. On top of that, Szczląsk, which became the champion of Poland, has lost its main investor, and the club’s prospects are vague.

The situation with attendance in Ukraine is somewhat better. An average of 37,000 people attended Shakhtar Donetsk matches in the 2011/12 season, and over the past two years, attendance has increased by 10,000. The difference between the Donbass Arena and other Ukrainian (and Polish) stadiums is that it belongs not to the state or city authorities, but to a private individual - Rinat Akhmetov, who also owns the football club itself. Quite good numbers are shown by Dynamo Kiev (average attendance - 21,000 people, at the Olympic Stadium - 41,000), Kharkov Metalist (26,000) and Lviv Karpaty (15,000 at Arena Lviv). Expectations in Ukraine are, in general, optimistic, although there is no talk of sell-outs at regular matches yet.

The prospect of return on investment for Polish stadiums will directly depend on whether the average level of Polish club football and its attractiveness for investors increases. Now it is significantly lower than the Ukrainian one: in Ukraine there are four clubs that regularly and relatively successfully compete in Eurocups. Polish clubs will also have to solve the problem of the dominance of the fan, hooligan factor in the stadiums, which, obviously, will require interaction with the state. And the payback of Ukrainian arenas, in turn, largely depends on the conditions of the business behind football projects: city budgets can hardly support facilities that cost hundreds of millions of euros.

Euro 2012: Who will pay for the stadiums