DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL is to spend nearly €3 million on the provision of public match screenings and a festival village for the four Euro 2020 matches that are to be held in Ireland.
DCC has put out to tender for interested parties to apply to develop a ‘creative direction’ for the Football Festival Village and multiple public viewing areas around the city in time for the tournament.
Euro 2020 will be the first European Championship held across the continent, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the first tournament.
Ireland, via the Aviva Stadium, will host four of the competition’s matches, on 15, 19, and 24 June 2020, together with a round-of-16 game on 30 June.
Dublin is paired with Bilbao in Spain for Group E matches in the tournament, which will see 51 games played in 12 cities across Europe from 12 June 2020.
The contract put out to tender is expected to be worth a maximum €2.9 million before VAT. DCC says it expects at least five bidders to reply to the tender request.
‘Dressing programme’
Per indicative figures provided by the council, roughly 80% (a maximum of €2.3 million) of that figure will go towards the provision and management of fanzones around the city.
10% (about €350,000) will go towards the ‘Host City Dressing Programme’ and the remaining 10% (just under €300,000) will be allocated towards pre-tournament promotional events.
The Football Festival Village will differ in certain key ways from the public viewing areas – the latter will only show the games being played in Dublin (together with two others, one of which will presumably be the final on 12 July), while all matches in the tournament will be shown in the village – a structure that will last for the duration of the tournament.
Viewing areas meanwhile will be temporary structures set up on the day and removed just as quickly at the end of each event.
The festival village will hold between 2,000 and 5,000 people, while viewing areas will hold up to 10,000 people with one giant screen.
The dressing programme is planned to see monuments and landmarks (and the main routes to the Aviva also) throughout the city dressed with flags and banners, together with ‘laser projections, building wraps, and countdown clocks’.
All pre-tournament events, designed to build anticipation for the tournament proper, are expected to take place within a year of the first match kicking off.
Deadline
Bids must be lodged by the tender deadline, Friday 26 October.
Fanzones have become an ubiquitous (and heavily branded – something European governing body UEFA will insist upon) element to international sporting tournaments, giving fans (both those with tickets and those without) the opportunity to have some fun and watch events in the tournament other than the ones they plan on attending themselves.
While Dublin has never played host to events in a tournament of this size, fanzones and public viewing areas are not unheard of in the capital.
In recent years the Dublin football team’s All Ireland finals have been broadcast live at Smithfield Square, while Ireland’s match against France in the last European Championship in 2016 was also shown at the same location.
However, where the viewing areas and festival village will be located is not yet known.
Whether Ireland will be present in the tournament itself of course remains to be seen.
Qualification for the tournament kicks off from next March.
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