Basketball: Seven candidates in the running to host FIBA EuroBasket 2021
FIBA Europe announced on Monday that seven national federations have formally applied to organize FIBA EuroBasket 2021.
Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Georgia, Hungary, Italy and Slovenia have each submitted an official bid by the March 15 deadline.
As none of the bids calls for hosting the event single-handedly, it is therefore confirmed that the 2021 Group Phase of European basketball’s flagship competition will be organized in four countries, with one of them also serving as host of the Final Phase.
Multi-hosting was in effect in both 2015 (Croatia; Germany; France; Latvia) and 2017 (Finland; Israel; Romania; Turkey), before the event switched from a two-year to a four-year cycle, following the introduction of FIBA’s New Competition System.
A total of 13 countries had initially expressed interest in knowing more about hosting FIBA EuroBasket 2021 when the process opened this past January.
Kamil Novak, FIBA Executive Director Europe, said: “This strong desire to organize EuroBasket that a big number of our European federations has expressed, it tells us that the appeal of the event continues to be as strong as ever – if not stronger. We are more than certain that, among the candidacies, we will find four ideal hosts as we did for the previous two events.”
FIBA Europe will evaluate all venues and infrastructures before the Board of FIBA Europe decides on the four hosts at its July 2019 meeting.
The FIBA Women’s EuroBasket 2019 bidding process was given an extention until April 15, to give more time to the federations that expressed their interest to prepare their bids.
