In last month’s excellent When Saturday Comes, Phil Town writes about the legacy of Euro2004 in Portugal. In the article he explores in brief what has happened to the stadiums used for the competition and how today 40% are basically white elephants or millstones around the respective club’s necks.
In our eyes 2004 was the finest tournament we have ever attended. We had fond memories of South Korea in 2002, and Germany in 2006 was everything you expected from the Germans, but 2004 beat all of them hands down for various reasons. During the course of the tournament we managed to squeeze in twelve games in nine of the venues, met Anders Frisk (the Swedish referee), played a 100 v 3 football match with Portuguese fans, shared a sun bed with Sepp Blatter’s number two (a person not something left in a toilet), gatecrashed the biggest meat-fest known to man, and hit a ball harder than Roberto Carlos. There wasn’t one day where something extraordinary didn’t happen.
“Time can never mend, the careless whispers of an old friend” as George Michael once famously said. UD Leiria saw little point in playing in front of Miguel, Manos and their dog Pedro so up sticks and moved Marinha Grande, down the road where their modest 6,000 seater stadium is a little less “roomy”. The Pessoa sits empty, awaiting a new owner to love and cherish it.
Leiria’s story is not the only one Simon Bates would be cranking out the “Our Tune” music to. Fifty kilometres up the road is the coastal town of Aveiro, famed for its tripe, canals but certainly not its football. Sport Clube Beira-Mar are the local side here and unlike UD Leiria they are still playing in the barren wastelands of the Estádio Municipal on the edge of town.
Today the stadium is costing the local council €650,000 to maintain, according to Phil Town and €2.5m in bank repayments. Even if Beira-Mar charged £50 a ticket for the whole of the season they would not be able to afford the running costs.
In between the towns of Leiria and Aveiro is the university town of Coimbra, which much to the mirth of the English, is pronounced Quim-bra, which hosted just two games in the tournament, hardly justifying the €53m paid out to redevelop the stadium. Coimbra was our base for most of the tournament, as it was almost halfway between Porto and Lisbon. It was here that we sat with “Sepp’s” men one afternoon, and discussed the impending financial crisis about to hit AS Parma thanks to collapse of main sponsor Parmalat whilst we sipped Superbock.
Since the tournament the ground has seen average attendances of less than 5,000. Whilst Associação Académia de Coimbra have kept themselves in the top division, the club can never grow because of the huge millstone around their necks.
England fans may remember Ledley King scoring here in one of the first games held at the stadium prior to Euro2004. Even then, with thousands of fans waiting for nearly an hour after the game to get public transport back to civilisation it could be seen that this was probably the biggest white elephant of the tournament. Since the championship the stadium has been shared by Sporting Clube Faroese and Louletano Desportes Clube, both who play way down the Portuguese footballing pyramid in front of hundreds rather than thousands of fans. It is unclear exactly how much the stadium is costing the local municipality on a monthly basis.
However, on the other side of town, logic was certainly not on the agenda. Boavista had been moderately successful in the years prior to the tournament. In 2001 they won the Portuguese league, and nearly repeated the feat 12 months later. They also made the second group stages of the Champions League in 2001/02 and the following season made it to the semi-final of the UEFA Cup, narrowly losing to Celtic and denying us an all Porto final in Seville.
However, the rebuilding of their “Bessa” stadium started to impact on the field performance. The cost of redevelopment spiralled to over €45 million and the club have suffered. Now playing in the third tier of Portuguese football, the 28,000 capacity stadium is a sparse place these days, with fewer than a couple of thousand in the stands, painfully reminding everyone the dangers of over committing.
The stadium hosted five games in the tournament, and we were lucky enough to see two games. First up was the thrashing of Bulgaria by Sweden in one of the first games of the tournament which was best remembered for the awful performance of referee Mike Riley (later that evening whilst sitting in the bar of our hotel Swedish referee Anders Fisk came in and wasn’t very complimentary of the performance of his “brother-in-arms”). We then came back a few weeks later for the quarter final between Greece and France.
The other amazing thing we saw at this game (apart from a surprise Greek win) was the presence of a man in black standing on top of the floodlight tower (see right). If you zoom in far enough you can actually make out a gun on his back. So now we know why Thierry Henry kept falling over so easily in the latter stages of the game.
The stadium has been well used by Sporting and has co-incided with an upturn in the club’s form. In 2005, perhaps inspired by the final being on home turf, Sporting reached the final of the UEFA Cup final. Almost all of the 47,000 in the stadium on that night were shocked to see CSKA Moscow run out 3-1 winners.
On the opening weekend of the tournament, The Current Mrs Fuller and I had tickets for England versus France, the opening game to be played at Benfica’s Estádio de Luz. The stadium was possibly the most impressive build for the tournament and at over €120m, the most expensive. It replaced the original stadium which held 120,000 at its peak and opened to a capacity crowd for a friendly with Nacional Montivideo in October 2003. Prior to the game we had been invited to a private event hosted by Carlsberg down in the FansZone in the Expo site. For two hours we were served more meat that I have ever seen in my life. Every few minutes another skewer of a different meat would arrive. If Carlsberg did BBQ’s…oh.
We made our way to the stadium with Frank Lampard senior (as you do) and exited the metro opposite the stadium and were met with chaos. The Portuguese authorities simply could not handle the number of fans arriving at the ground and so made us walk along the edge of the highway (of course they didn’t close the road) before double-backing on ourselves to reach the stadium. Utter farce.
At first the crowd didn’t move. And then they started to part. And then a slow clap. A faster rhythm and then back slapping. A beer is thrust in my hand, a ball appears at out feet and all of a sudden it is England v Portugal all over again. 3 of us versus 100 of them. But who cares – it was an awesome hour. Who cares that we lost, we were part of the best night of celebrations we had ever seen.