UEFA finally abandoned the idea of increasing the number of participants in the final part of the European Championship to 32 teams, Sky News reports.
According to the source, UEFA came to the unequivocal conclusion that the qualifying stage of the European Championship, according to the results of which more than half of the participating teams (32 out of 55 teams) will advance to the final part of the tournament, will simply devalue the competition and make it unattractive.
As a result, it was decided to keep the current format of the European Championship, in which 24 national teams take part in the final part of the tournament. It is expected that this will be officially announced during the meeting of the UEFA Executive Committee in November.
Let us recall that earlier it was reported that in deciding the fate of the initiative to expand the number of Euro participants, broadcasters also played an important role, who managed to convince UEFA that with 32 participants in the European Championship, the qualifying round of the tournament would be commercially uninteresting.
Recall that for the first time Euro 2016 was held among 24 participants (before that, 16 teams entered the European Championship). After that, UEFA came up with the idea to expand the composition of the championship to 32 teams - starting from Euro 2028.