EC to enter new cycle

The upcoming 2012 season of European american football will see the start of a new cycle in the European Championships series for national teams. In the end the 13th European champion will be crowned in 2014, but the race for the championship will start in 2012, when the national teams from the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Serbia and Belarus will play the tournament of the C-pool to earn a spot for the 2013 B-pool tournament. In total 15 nations have enrolled their teams into the competition, one more than the 14 of the last series.

The concept of a tournament series with a standardized scheduling formula, in which teams are grouped together according to their level of play in the three different pools, has proven as a true success in the last decade. EFAF member federations of all sizes and all different levels of play are supplied with a perspective for their national team programmes. Rosters may be built up for the teams within a given and reliable timeframe and games only are played amongst teams with similar skills, avoiding the heavy losses some of the smaller american football countries had to accept in the past after entering a qualification round and facing much stronger opponents. Still the dream of winning the whole series is kept alive - and Austria in the last series demonstrated that it is possible to emerge from C- through B- into the A-pool. Eventually the Austrians earned a „true“ qualification spot for the IFAF World Cup with their third-place-finish in the European Championships and did not need to rely on their automatic berth as the World Cup hosts.

Considerations on where and when the 2012 C-pool will be staged are currently under way with the EFAF board in close connection with the participating nations to find a place most suitable for all the contestants. The B-pool tournament in 2013 will be held in Italy, where Denmark, Great Britain, Spain, the Czech Republic, the hosts from Italy and the winner of the C-pool will play for promotion into the A-pool. Certainly this will turn into one of the closest battles in the history of European Championships, when Great Britain and Italy with american football traditions amongst the most longstanding in Europe will try to hold off the challenge by a group of countries, in which tremendous progress has been made in recent years. The winner will go on into the 2014 A-pool and have a shot of battling reigning champion Germany, its fierce rivals form France and Austria, who already nearly caught up with the Germans at the World Cup, and the two Nordic powerhouses from Sweden and Finland.

After Germany staged a very successful tournament in 2010, Austria celebrated a true american football festival when hosting the World Cup 2011 (and already staged C- and B-pool tournaments in the last series) and Sweden hosted the 2005 European Championships the search for the 2014 hosts has already begun. Germany and Austria both benefitted a lot from staging the events. Long-term effects are not to be underestimated as both established a lot of partnerships with key institutions from the public or private sector and were able to showcase their american football programmes in national or pan-European media. So even when both leveled the standards for such events to a new high EFAF is confident staging such events will reward any member federation in the long run. And yes, in the short run as well: All EC tournaments in all pools since 2005 were won by the hosting team...