UEFA
The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA /juːˈeɪfə/ yoo-AY-fə; French: Union des associations européennes de football;[a] German: Union der europäischen Fußballverbände)[b] is the administrative body for football, futsal and beach soccer in Europe, as well as Armenia, Israel and the Asian parts of some transcontinental countries. It is one of six continental confederations of world football's governing body FIFA. UEFA consists of 55 national association members. Because of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, FIFA and UEFA suspended from FIFA and UEFA competitions all Russian teams, whether national representative teams or club teams.[3]
UEFA represents the national football associations of Europe, runs nation and club competitions including the UEFA European Championship, UEFA Nations League, UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, UEFA Europa Conference League, and UEFA Super Cup, and controls the prize money, regulations, and media rights to those competitions.
Henri Delaunay was the first general secretary and Ebbe Schwartz the first president. The current president is Aleksander Čeferin, a former Football Association of Slovenia president, who was elected as UEFA's seventh president at the 12th Extraordinary UEFA Congress in Athens in September 2016, and automatically became a vice-president of the world body FIFA.[4]
UEFA was founded on 15 June 1954 in Basel, Switzerland after consultation between the Italian, French, and Belgian associations.[5] At the founding meeting, 25 members were present. However, 6 other associations which were not present were still recognised as founding members, bringing the total of founding associations to 31.[6] UEFA grew to more than 50 members by the mid-1990s, as new associations were born out of the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia into their constituent states.
UEFA's main headquarters after its foundation were located in Paris, but moved to Bern in 1960. They moved to Nyon, Switzerland, in 1995, where they operated out of temporary offices until 1999 while the organisation's current headquarters were under construction.[7]
UEFA membership coincides for the most part with recognition as a sovereign country in Europe (48 out of 55 members are sovereign UN member states), although there are some exceptions. One UN member state (Monaco) and one UN observer state (Vatican City) are not members. Some UEFA members are not sovereign states, but form part of a larger recognised sovereign state in the context of international law. These include England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales (constituent countries of the United Kingdom), Gibraltar (British Overseas Territory), the Faroe Islands (constituent country within the Kingdom of Denmark), and Kosovo (state with limited recognition), however, in the context of these countries, government functions concerning sport tend to be carried at the territorial level coterminous with the UEFA member entity.
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