Yesterday our national football federation decided that Basel will be the Swiss main stadium - during the european championships in 2008, but also for NT games where they expect a lot of people and maybe also for the upcoming cup finals when the Wankdorf in Bern is already operating.
For the Euro you need one stadium with a capacity of more than 50'000 (Vienna) for the final and one with more than 40'000. This used to be Berne, but they actually build a 30'000 stadium and only wanted to make a temporary solution for the 10'000 additional seats during the Euro - Swiss football federation would have been forced to pay 11 million francs just for those few games and afterwards there would have been no more 40'000 stadium. So the company who runs our stadium decided about 2 months ago to offer the federation an own project with an "upgrading" of our stadium up to a capacity of 41'500 people, which costs 22 million francs, but the federation only has to pay 5 million. There will be a third stand on the opposite side of the grandstand and the seats will be a little closer to one another, which means less comfort but I think there's still enough room compared to for example stadiums in England. Now the federation decided to accept this offer with the consequences I described in the beginning.
For me it's a great thing to have the opening game in Basel, which will draw a lot of attention to our beautiful city - and two more group games, two quarter and a semi final. Although it isn't very likely that I'll be able to see any of those games it'll be cool to have that many nations in town - hopefully our police knows what they have to do, which is very doubtful. On the other hand it's a shame IMHO if the most important goal considering the cup finals is the profit maximisation - maybe someday they'll play it where one of the finalists comes from just to fill the stadium. It's just another feeling to travel to the final and not to have just another game in your home stadium. I can ignore the NT games here, but I can't ignore the cup final - at least when we play.
Furthermore I just hope that the rent for the stadium won't go up, or at least not too much, because the investors have to amortise their spendings and that the people keep coming to they games even when we aren't that good one time. Wouldn't be great to have 10'000 people in a 40'000 stadium.
I ran out of ideas.
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)....was built to hold 110,000 people but has since had the capacity reduced to 80,000 which is a far better number IMO 
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