Can domain names predict where Euro2016 will be held?
Whilst I was in the middle of researching the websites associated with this year's Africa Cup of Nations, it suddenly occurred to me to check whether a website had been set-up for Poland and Ukraine's joint Euro2012 tournament. Since UEFA recently issued a stern warning (stern for them, anyway) expressing concern about the pace of preparations, I was pleasantly surprised that the domain is registered and already pointing to UEFA.
Which got me thinking about euro2016.com and beyond.
It seems I wasn't the first by a long chalk, as it looked like every European Championship Tournament date up to 2080 has had its domain name registered by someone. Interestingly not all being squatted by the same company, although you'd think if you were the first person to come up with the idea of registering euro2068.com, doing euro2072.com next kind of suggests itself.
As I started going through them, it seemed like I might be gazing into a crystal ball, implying who might be getting to host the tournament. Euro2036 looks like it might go to Germany.
Poland seem up for hosting Euro2044, on their own this time.
And I thought it looked like current champions Greece were all set for Euro2048, but on second impression I think the Greek bits of the page were being inserted based on my IP address, rather than because the site was being hosted here.
Still, at least these suggest that future European Championships will be held in Europe. With all the fuss about the Premiership planning matches abroad, you can never be sure. Certainly, judging by the euro2024.com website, it looks like that tournament might be on the other side of the Atlantic.
You'd think, if you were going to squat the domain name of a tournament, you'd make a squatting site for the right type of football, wouldn't you?
In the end I wonder about the business sense of squatting domains like those anyway. I'm unsure how much revenue you can pull in by paying for www.euro2020.com for the 8 years or so, until you inevitably have to cede it to UEFA as a transparently bad faith registration.
For the meantime, I'm still left wondering why UEFA's own website isn't set up to make the URL's more people-friendly. The rather obvious type-in URL www.uefa.com/euro2008 returns a 404 error.
Posted by Martin Belam, March 7, 2008
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2 comments so far
My understanding is that the registration of URLs with the purpose of selling them on to the rightful (ethically) owners is illegal.
In a case a few years ago a student had registered a 4 letter acronym which co-incidentally became important for Meryll Lynch after a merger. They paid millions of dollars for it.
Now it seems that crooks are using the system to make money and Internic have stopped it.
I checked Euro2016 and it is up for sale.
I have never thought about it. Looks like we can do some sort of prediction of sports industry using domain names too. Have you tried fifa world cup?