First match
November 11, 2011
The first game in the renovated Kyiv Olympic Stadium sees Ukraine hosting the German national soccer team in a friendly match on Friday. It's a test match for the 2012 European Championship, which will take place from June 8 to July 1 next summer in Poland and Ukraine.
The stadium in Kyiv will feature the tournament's final, as well as three group stage matches and a quarterfinal match.
Kyiv is one of four EURO 2012 sites in the country. The other three stadiums, in Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Lviv, have also been finished.
The final stadium to be completed was the one in Lviv at the end of October. Three weeks ahead of that, the stadium in Kyiv was finished.
Construction stops and rising costs
The Olympic Stadium in Kyiv was long considered to be the problem child of EURO 2012. Construction stoppages kept delaying the date of completion. Kyiv nearly lost the right to host the tournament.
Europe's governing body of football (UEFA) expressed concerns about safety concerning a shopping center being built near the stadium, which would have encroached on the space needed to evacuate the stadium in an emergency. After much debate between officials and those building the shopping center, the initial structural work was torn down.
For the Ukrainian public, however, the biggest scandal involved the spiraling costs of the renovation of the most important arena in the country. The three-year project cost around 500 million euro ($681 million), four times more than initially estimated.
Pavlo Babenko of the Ukrainian "Citizens Committee EURO 2012" believes a completely new stadium would have been cheaper.
"The Olympic Stadium is practically a historic arena," he said. "The renovation was more of a question of prestige for the city. Economically it was hardly justifiable."
Lack of affordable hotels
Ukraine's airports are prepared for the flood of fans expected at the tournament. In all four host cities, new airport terminals have been built. Once fans reach the cities, however, it doesn't look good. According to the German Agency for International Cooperation, for every 1,000 citizens of Ukraine there aren't even two hotel beds. Poland, by comparison, has 24.
The biggest gap is in the number of three-star hotels, which experience the highest demand. Those that do exist in Ukraine don't meet Western standards. They are also more expensive than they are in the European Union.
That's because of the lack of options, says Natalija Lysnjak from the Kyiv advisory institution ArtBuild Hotel Group.
"We need more competition," she said. "The hotels that are currently available set the prices. If customers had a bigger selection, prices would drop."
Most of the hotels in Ukraine are from the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few luxury hotels, few Western hotel chains have built hotels in Ukraine in the last 20 years.
That has been changing in the run-up to EURO 2012. At the beginning of August the first three-star hotel belonging to a foreign chain opened in Kyiv. Other hotels want to follow suit and open next year.
Private rooms will also be hard to come by due to the lack of hotel rooms. Thus the city of Kyiv is planning on hosting fans in tents.
Author: Markian Ostaptschuk / mz
Editor: Nancy Isenson