Overview

Panenka's pearl of a penalty in Belgrade, van Basten's volley of a lifetime in Munich, Gazza's agonising near-miss at Wembley: over its six decades, the UEFA European Championship has thrown up many of the most memorable stories in football lore. Now it gets the history it deserves. Euro Summits is the first full retelling of the tournament, from its tentative beginnings in the late 1950s to its elephantine expansion in the mid-2010s. Taking in the USSR's early success, the grim violence of 1968, France's cavalier feats on home soil in 1984, the sensational triumphs of no-hopers Denmark and Greece, Spain's modern-day dominance, all the way up to Italy's dramatic victory at Wembley in 2021, it's a panoramic portrait of an event that captures a whole continent's imagination every four years.. Dramatic, detailed and teeming with compelling personalities like Michel Platini, Gunter Netzer, Hristo Stoichkov, Zinedine Zidane, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, this is the complete story of a footballing event second only to the World Cup.

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9781836800064

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Reviews

""A Homeric 60-year odyssey across 15 tournaments. Breezy yet comprehensive, fun but authoritative, think of it as the perfect companion piece for Cris Freddi's famous Complete Book of the World Cup, and I can't think of praise too much higher than that."" -- Scott Murray * The Guardian * ""While the author is an Irish journalist, there's nothing green-tinted about his book. Ireland is but a footnote in the whole story, which covers all the tournaments from 1960 to 2016. Euro Summits is meticulous in detailing the planning that made that first tournament in France in 1960 a reality. Each of the four-year instalments gets equal coverage, even as the participation swelled from four countries in its inaugural year to 24 in 2016. A simple retelling of each tournament would have been about as dull as watching Ireland's strikers trying to score, but O'Brien is both a fine writer and storyteller and he succeeds in bringing long-ago tournaments and some of the more recent ones to life... Quite an achievement... Euro Summits is a fitting tome for one of sport's great undertakings."" * The Irish Independent *

Author Information

Jonathan O'Brien is a professional editor and writer who lives in Dublin in Ireland. His work has appeared in the Business Post (his employer), the Irish Independent, the Sunday Tribune and When Saturday Comes.

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