If Euro 2024 coming to an end has left a whole in your soul that only a major sporting event can fill, then you’re in luck.
Starting just 12 days after the Euros final in Berlin is summer’s other tentpole event – the Paris Olympics. Among the 32 sports being contested in the French capital will be men and women’s football – although it is a very different tournament to the usual summer competitions.
Here’s a look at how it works – and why Team GB won’t be competing for the gold medal this summer.
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Football has been contested at every Summer Olympic Games since 1900, bar the 1932 games, when FIFA were looking to promote their shiny new World Cup competition, while women’s football was added for the first time in 1996.
To avoid direct competition with the World Cup, FIFA have set rules on who can play in the men’s tournament, with the current model being that it is an under-23s tournament with three overage players allowed.
In the women’s game, the Olympics is classified as a full senior-level international tournament.
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Why aren’t Team GB playing at the Paris Olympics?
The Team GB men’s side celebrate at the 2012 Olympics (Image credit: PA)
We’ll start with the men, as that’s the more complicated situation.
Whereas FIFA governs the World Cup and European Championship, the Olympics fall under the jurisdiction of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – and this is where the issue lies.
In these FIFA or UEFA competitions, each country in the UK has it’s own team – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – meaning each of these four sides competes as their own nation.
The women’s Team GB side in 2012
However, the IOC classifies Great Britain as one entity and while we did see a Great Britain team compete during the first half of the 20th century, winning gold in 1900, 1908 and 1912, they competed for the final time in 1960, as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland feared their continuing participation threatened their status as individual competitors in FIFA tournaments.
While we did see a one-off compromise reached for the London 2012 Games, when Team GB lost to South Korea in the quarter-finals, no agreement has been sought since, so there will be no Team GB in Paris.
The situation around the women’s team is different, as an agreement was reached for the Tokyo Games in 2020, which saw the home nations agree that the highest-ranking nation between the four would claim one of the three slots for European sides, should they qualify. Unfortunately, England, the best home nation finisher, were unable to qualify, with France, Spain and Germany taking the three spots.
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