Gibraltar-France: why does the opponent of the Blues play his home matches … in Portugal?


Romain Rouillard and Jean-François Pérès / Photo credit: FRAN SANTIAGO / GETTY IMAGES EUROPE / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
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8:46 a.m., June 16, 2023

The French football team continues its qualifying campaign for Euro 2024 this Friday with a trip to Faro in Portugal. Not to face the selection led by Cristiano Ronaldo but the modest formation of Gibraltar, forced to welcome their opponents nearly 400 km from British territory.

The supporters of the Blues, diligent enough to follow Didier Deschamps’ troupe wherever they go, thought they might discover Gibraltar during these Euro 2024 qualifiers. This British territory, located in the south of Spain on the edge of the strait of the same name, is indeed home to a modest selection ranked 201st in the Fifa rankings and which will challenge the France team this Friday. Only then, the meeting will take place nearly 400 km away, in Faro in the south of Portugal.

If the destination should still delight tricolor fans, such a singularity raises questions. To understand it, we have to go back to October 2022, when UEFA put an end to the special exemption which authorized Gibraltar to play in its Victoria Stadium. The dilapidated 5,000-seat enclosure, located on the edge of the Mediterranean and adjoining the airport, no longer met the certification standards required on many points, including “lighting, stadium capacity and other points of more technical infrastructure”.

The construction of the new stadium, delayed

Gibraltar was, however, authorized to receive its opponents in its usual setting, on the condition of launching, in parallel, the construction of its new national stadium. But the pandemic Covid-19 has considerably delayed the work which was to be launched between 2020 and 2021. The Gibraltar Football Federation has therefore obtained from UEFA an extension of this special clearance. The first stone of the new enclosure should be laid “in the second half of 2023”, according to the Federation.

The Gibraltar team will have the opportunity to bid farewell to the Victoria Stadium in two friendlies scheduled for November. Opponents are yet to be determined. In the meantime, it is four hours’ drive from its rock that the modest selection will welcome the reigning vice-world champions. The match will take place at the Estadio do Algarve, with a capacity of 30,000 seats, and built for Euro 2004. The stadium had already hosted Gibraltar’s selection in 2014 when it joined as a UEFA member in waiting for the renovation work at Victoria Stadium to be completed.





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