No shocks in football any more? Tell that to Italy, whose main sports newspaper, Gazzetta dello Sport, on the morning of Uefa’s decision on where to host Euro 2012, prematurely proclaimed: “We’ve won.”

The fact that it came as a shock when last April Uefa instead granted the tournament to the joint Poland-Ukraine bid, ahead of Italy and another joint bid by Croatia and Hungary, indicates what a closed shop European football had become under Lennart Johansson, the former president of European football’s governing body. The east has not hosted a major tournament since Yugoslavia in 1976, and that was when the final stages of a European Championship comprised only the four semi-finalists.