UEFA has announced that it has made a deal with Deutsche Bahn to provide cheap train tickets for football fans travelling to Germany for the 2024 European Championships. People travelling from many countries within Europe can benefit from the offer.
UEFA and Deutsche Bahn have struck a deal which will mean people with a ticket to watch a Euros 2024 match in one of Germany’s 10 host cities will be able to purchase DB train tickets for just 30 euros.
The deal will apply to Deutsche Bahn trains travelling from any of the six countries where DB currently operates ICE trains; Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. If fans live outside any of these six European countries, InterRail tickets from Deutsche Bahn will also be cheaper for match ticket holders, though further details on this offer are yet to be announced.
Once they arrive in one of Germany’s nine host cities; Berlin, Munich, Leipzig, Hamburg, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, match ticket holders will also be able to use local public transport for free.
The plan to get more fans to the host cities by train is part of UEFA’s attempt to make the competition more environmentally friendly. The body has previously come under fire for greenwashing after saying that it would plant 600.000 trees in Euros 2020 host countries while simultaneously holding (now-ended) sponsorship deals with Gazprom and China’s biggest blockchain platform, ByBit.
While the new train ticket policy has been praised by some environmental organisations, the German Federation for Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) has said that the cheap train tickets should already go on sale, rather than being available only after the match tickets are available.
"That's too late," Jens Hilgenberg of BUND said to the ARD Sportschau. Hilgenberg added that the deal should be better communicated to fans and combined with the match ticket purchasing process. "That would mean being able to book a train ticket directly when booking the ticket for the match and not just afterwards," he said. "That's an opportunity that is now being missed."
While the match schedule for the 2024 tournament is yet to be finalised, 1,2 million tickets have already been sold using a lottery system, which saw 20 million try to get their hands on a ticket. Applicants have been notified this week as to whether their efforts to get tickets were successful or not. If they were, lottery winners must pay for their tickets by November 17 to ensure that they are not passed on to someone else.
Otherwise, one million more tickets will be released on December 2, and 500.000 in the early spring of next year. However, competition to get tickets is only set to get tougher, as more group-stage matches are played and it becomes clearer in which German cities the “ones-to-watch” teams, like England, France and hosts Germany, will be playing in the tournament next June and July.
The games will kick off in Munich on June 14 and the final is scheduled to take place at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on July 14.
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