Turkey is finally set to be awarded the hosting rights for a major international football tournament this week when UEFA decides where Euro 2032 will be staged.
Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long dreamt of hosting one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events in his country.
UEFA’s executive committee meets on Tuesday, October 10, to announce the hosts for the 2028 and 2032 European Championships.
Turkey withdrew its bid to host in 2028 in order to focus all its efforts on a united proposal with Italy to stage the tournament four years later.
Winning the right to host the biggest sporting event in Europe would be one of the crowning moments of his time in power.
“In modern times, sport has always been perceived as a means for Turkey to forge its own legitimacy and compete equally with the rest of the western world,” says Daghan Irak, a lecturer in media communication at the University of Huddersfield in England.
“Erdogan has not diverted from that historic strategy.”
Erdogan became prime minister at the end of 2002, at the same time Turkey’s joint bid with Greece during a period of improving relations between the two countries to host Euro 2008 failed.
UEFA awarded that tournament to Austria and Switzerland.
Turkey then went out on its own in a bid to host Euro 2012, only to miss out on a joint Ukraine-Poland candidacy, while in 2016 it lost out to France.
They then missed out to Germany for Euro 2024, with UEFA’s evaluation of the bid highlighting concerns about the country’s “lack of an action plan in the area of human rights”.
