Euro 2012 in Poland: Recalibrations of statehood in Eastern Europe

Reconfiguring state/territory relations

This section explores the relations between territory and state as they are produced by the Euro, with a particular focus on the case of Warsaw. The aim in so doing is to enable the complex patchwork of statehood produced by Euro 2012 to be seen in relation to a longer term historical narrative within which the national stadium plays a significant role. The changing significance of the stadium leads into wider considerations of how the Euro complicates relations between the state and its territory, in particular in terms of the state’s role in investment, taxation and spatial management.

Built from the rubble of what was left of the centre of the city after the war, the stadium in Warsaw was opened in 1955 on the east bank of the Wisła river where it played host to the pageants and sporting events of the People’s Republic of Poland. By 1989, however, the stadium no longer played this symbolic role and in order to lighten the burden of the stadium on the city’s budget, the authorities invited a little known firm, Damis, to rent the stadium. The result over the following two decades was the growth of a vast semi-formal bazaar, where, in an array of precarious booths, over 5000 traders from countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Nigeria, Syria, Armenia and later Vietnam made use of new configurations of uneven economic development and freedom of movement to travel to sell their goods. The stadium market was famous both for the extent of its annual turnover – which at its prime in the mid-1990s stood officially at 500m złoty (€120m), unofficially at 12bn złoty (€3bn) – and for the level of its criminality, and the sale of fake products and contraband (Kołodziejczyk and Pytlakowski, 2007; Najwyższa Izba Kontroli (NIK), 2005).

Although by the late 2000s the role of the stadium market, under competition from international retail chains, was no longer as significant, it was nonetheless the decision to award the hosting of the 2012 European football championships to Poland and Ukraine that precipitated its closure. After considerable hesitation, the city authorities took the decision to construct a new national stadium on the site and remove the market to a specially planned, but less central location. Thus, the chaotic, unregulated international trading networks of the 1990s/early 2000s were replaced by the imposing structure of the national stadium, with its red and white siding in the colours of the national flag, which by night swoosh in various combinations of LED illuminations. The message visible from points all round the city is that of Poland’s accession to the state of the art family of global sport and entertainment. As a delighted Minister of Sport stated in her post tournament summary, visiting fans perceived Poland as an ‘open, modern, European country’ (Polska Agencja Prasowa (PAP), 2012).

Euro 2012 as a step on this pathway of modernisation was more important than the economic calculations justifying the event, but this narrative also provides a foundation for a scenario of growth and development which enables the outcomes of the Euro to be calculated in terms of long-term gain (Borowski, 2012). Moreover, Euro 2012 was an often indistinguishable part of the programme to modernise Poland being undertaken through a great quantity and variety of projects financed through EU operational programmes. It was, and indeed still is, difficult to determine which of the enormous range of infrastructure investments made for Euro 2012, from motorways through railways stations, airports, bridges and a metro line (still unfinished), to hotel provision and new stadia, at a cost estimated at between 84bn złoty ((€20bn) Erste Group, 2012) to over 94bn złoty ((€22bn) Łangalis, 2012) were undertaken specifically for the tournament, and which were part of a wider process of the development of Poland.

Behind the new national stadium’s patriotic facade, its territorial allegiances are more complex. For while it was the nation state that financed the stadium at a cost of 1.9bn złoty (€450m), it was designed by an international consortium of JSK Architects, gmp International and Schlaich Bergermann und Partner, and constructed by another headed by Alpine Bau, Hydrobudowa and PBG, who in turn engaged several hundred sub-contracting firms of different origins. A similar situation can be observed in other high profile infrastructure renovations undertaken around Warsaw in the period leading up to the Euro, such as the renovation of the Eastern Railway Station (Strabag); the Stadium Railway Station (Bilfinger Berger and Przedsiębiorstwa Agat); the Central Railway Station (Porr); Warsaw’s Chopin Airport (Ferrovial, Budimex and Estudio Lamiler); and different sections of the Warsaw-Łódż stretch of the Warsaw-Berlin motorway (China Overseas Engineering Group; Mostostal Warszawa/Acciona Infraestructuras/Polimex-Mostostal; Strabag/Mota-Engil; Budimex-Dromex/Ferrovial Agroman and Hydrobudowa).

In each case, the details of the consortia and the course of the investments would be interesting to follow more closely: however, as should be obvious from the extent and composite nature of the groupings listed, this is no easy task. What is significant for this paper is that each of these projects is a state generated investment financed either directly by the state, sometimes with financial assistance from the EU, in which an international consortium won the tender to realise the investment. Thus, what seems like a usual situation in a global free market in fact requires both state (or European) investment and regulation procedures for the procuring of tenders for investments, and for overseeing that the work is carried out as per specifications. These procedures are problematic and have led to resignations of state appointed managers (the National Stadium) and developers being ejected from tenders they had won (the A2 motorway and Chopin Airport); court cases between the state and developers (Chopin Airport and the National Stadium); and in the period following Euro 2012 a number of firms, both Polish subsidiaries, such as Hydrobudowa and PBG, involved in the construction of the National Stadium and sections of the A2 motorway (as well as the stadia in Poznań and Gdańsk), and international firms, such as Alpine Bau, have gone bankrupt (Czarkowski, 2012; Kacprzak, 2012).

If the investments in preparing for Euro 2012 see the state emerging as a necessary but awkward cog in international infrastructure commissions, the staging of the tournament itself reveals a more dramatic extension of a similar tendency. The investment in the stadium in Warsaw, for example, was made specifically to host the five matches played there as part of Euro 2012 during which time the stadium, as was the case for all the venues hosting Euro 2012 matches, was administered by the firm EURO 2012 Polska, a firm appointed through the Polish Football Association, and thus directly controlled by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), to manage the 2012 football championships in Poland. It was UEFA who earned the money from the matches, derived from television rights, marketing deals and ticket sales (in decreasing order of importance). As customary at such events, fans arriving at Euro 2012 matches in Warsaw experienced the queues, security procedures and identity checks usually encountered when crossing national borders at airports. The similarity of corporal experience between these instances belies a deeper truth: for organising Euro 2012 in Warsaw inaugurated a new configuration of the frontiers of governance, whereby the state’s control over its territory, even that of the National Stadium adorned with red and white flags at the heart of its capital, was suspended for the period of the event for which it was constructed. Szwedo (2011) and Włoch (2012) note that this was the next step in a longer history of UEFA obstructing the Polish government’s jurisdiction by opposing its attempts to reform the Polish Football Association.

The same security checks were in place at the fan zone in the city centre and the fan camp for visiting fans in the northern part of Warsaw by the Wisła river. Both these sites emerged as a result of contracts signed between the city and UEFA, which specified the division of responsibilities between parties, the hierarchy of firms able to promote themselves or sell their products in these spaces (with UEFA partners at the top), the obligation to enact a clean space policy in the vicinity (i.e. for there to be no advertising from partners’ competitors), the levels of payments to be levied, or not, by the city from those companies present in the fan zone and even the types of firms that could be used to collect rubbish or provide other services. During the Euro, the major concentrations of people were in the central fan zone and the stadium, both spaces either totally or partially temporarily transferred to UEFA, and along the major thoroughfare in between, which was pedestrianised on match days. Other spaces within the city, such as the bohemian Praga district, adjacent to the stadium but on the other side from this channel, were less populated than on ordinary summer evenings.

However, it was not just physically but fiscally that the Polish state’s relation to its territory was obstructed by Euro 2012. For one of the preconditions to the organising of Euro 2012 was for UEFA to be granted a tax exemption. The guarantees demanded by UEFA regarding tax require an exemption that covers all income, corporate or sales taxes liable to UEFA, to UEFA’s significant local office in the host country or to designated individuals associated with UEFA, and that the Ministry of Finance make every effort to secure VAT refunds for UEFA, its event company and designated persons (Tetłak, 2012b; Tetłak and Molenaar, 2012). In this context, designated persons covers all those not tax resident in Poland working for UEFA or its event company, and others whose work is necessary for the production of the event: referees, those associated with national teams (players, coaches, doctors), media accredited by UEFA, those associated with UEFA’s commercial partners, and other persons accredited by UEFA (Tetłak, 2012b: 8).

Tetłak argues that the wording of this requirement is vague as to who it covers and that its principal of not taxing the earnings of those performing in Poland as part of a media or sports’ event is at odds with Polish tax law (Tetłak, 2012b: 11). The way round this was for the Polish government to offer a tax desist which, according to Polish law, can be justified in cases in the public interest of taxpayers. Thus, the Polish government stated that it recognises that UEFA Euro 2012 carries ‘several essential human, economical and social values’ and that ‘in this context, the income tax desist, as one of the conditions for granting the organization of the European Football Championship to Poland, is undoubtedly justified by public interest’ (Tetłak, 2012b: 8). However, as Tetłak comments, this logic is circular: the desist is in the public interest because it is a condition imposed by UEFA. The upshot is an extraordinary precedent: while organisers and performers in sports or cultural events in Poland would usually be taxed, those who played in Euro 2012 were not.

Thus, the passage of the national stadium in Warsaw has been the reverse of what it might have first appeared: from the partial control and incomplete taxation of the semi-formal, semi-legal market to the legally binding total ceding of the right to tax the earnings from the event for which the state invested enormous amounts to construct the infrastructure to host. Informal economic practice has transformed into formal guarantees enabling UEFA to avoid tax payments in the host nation and thus face its tax responsibilities in Switzerland in the Canton of Vaud, where both it and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are registered, a region which promotes itself through offering tax exemptions for international institutions working ‘purely in the public interest’ (Vaud Canton Website, 2012). It is on this basis that Tetłak suggests that the Polish public should be recognised as an unacknowledged sponsor of the games, but one uniquely not allowed to negotiate its own terms (Tetłak, 2012a; see also Kałucki and Kacprzak, 2012; Łangalis, 2012).

While this is a precedent, it is not an exception, but rather a strengthening of a tendency for the new EU nation states to be presented on the international arena through their willingness to reduce taxation. Recently accessed EU states boast a range of special economic zones offering tax exemptions to firms that invest in them, while corporate tax rates in the region are consistently lower than those elsewhere in the EU, where they are also causing a drive downwards (Bohle, 2009; Crabbe and Vandenbussche, 2010). All of which forms a marked contrast with the Polish state’s increasingly draconian efforts to regulate the flow of, for example, cigarettes across the Ukraine–Poland border, with the legal limit reduced to one packet of 20 per day, explained by the fact that the import of greater quantities is a crime that costs the Polish state by denying its right to tax.

The contrast between the regulation of the EU–non-EU border between Poland and Ukraine and the organisation of the Euro in the two countries speaks volumes to the limits of the just regulation of spaces emerging as a result of the intensification of international connections (Smith et al., 2008). Far from free-market liberalism, the state is required to invest, regulate and oversee development investments at the same time as it reneges on the right to tax as the necessary condition for inward investment that may produce change, while at the same time striving to secure its border against the movement of goods motivated by local price differentials on the basis that this contravenes the state’s right to tax. What this leads to is a paradoxical mix of deregulating and reregulating, of the dismantling and multiplying of quasi-borders, and of the intensifying of existing hierarchies of uneven spatial development at a number of levels (intra-urban, inter-urban and international) (Brenner, 2009; Peck, 2010). Rather than bringing Poland and Ukraine together, the failure of the jointly held Euro 2012 to improve cross-border connection between the two nations (Konieczna-Sałamatin et al., 2012) should be read as a sad, but predictable consequence of the reconfigurations afoot.

Reconfiguring state/monopoly relations

Mega-event organisers are both non-governmental international sports’ regulators and highly profitable businesses. In other words, they function as monopoly regulators, while also using this position as a means to extract monopoly rents from the events they organise. The configurations through which these non-business and business interests interact and the effects caused are not unilateral or self-evident. Rather, the case of Euro 2012 reveals the processes of argumentation and legislation through which monopoly rights are protected to be fraught and of dubious logic, while the results they achieve erect new borders between starkly different economic logics. As such, mega-events are an important moment in an ongoing and crisis-ridden battle for monopoly rents occurring as a result of globalisation’s rearrangement of the relations between monopoly and space (Harvey, 2002; Plihon, 2004). In this context, the quest to patrol the borders of monopolies emerges as a significant but not coherent element in the Polish government’s conception of what contemporary European statehood means, and thus also poses a question as to the role of Europe in an emergent hierarchy of relations between spaces and monopolies. The details of this process as they emerge from Euro 2012 are the focus of this section.

Despite the glitz and excess that surrounds contemporary mega-events, they function through a logic of scarcity: mega-events are de jure in short supply on a global horizon. It is a mega-event’s position of monopoly in an economy of attention which is at the heart of its principal source of revenue: the sale of television and associated marketing and partnership rights. De facto this means that the competitions in which countries bid for the right to organise these events are scrabbling for crumbs under the master’s table. Prospective hosts calculate that the huge investments into mega-events, generally principally made by the state, will be offset by an increased number of tourists visiting a country and heightened media attention that will have a positive growth effect in an expanded time horizon. Over and above the fact that calculations of revenue for host countries are generally overly optimistic (Hall, 2006; Kozak, 2010), it should also be stressed that qualitatively this revenue is a side issue. The event organiser exercises a global monopoly over its brand, whereas the country it is hosted in attempts to welcome this monopoly event to increase its competitiveness in the international tourism and investment market. Thus, rather than bringing together different spaces in the mega of an event with global reach, the event enacts and deepens a division between (at least) two quite different economic logics: that of a global monopoly brand versus a fixed space in a competitive international market.

Moreover, Andre Louw (2012) argues that monopoly events are not simply monopolies: they are advancing the understanding of what a monopoly is and what it can do. A monopoly event organiser, for example UEFA, relies on the event being treated as its intellectual property and protected by intellectual property law based on the claim that ‘UEFA is the exclusive owner of all existing and future Marketing Rights, Media Rights and other commercial rights in respect of UEFA EURO 2012’ (UEFA, 2004: 42). Without going into the question of whether UEFA deserves to be able to claim exclusive rights of ownership over this composite event, the question that emerges in Louw’s analysis is whether such a claim is legally tenable. The bidding document for Euro 2012 goes on to clarify:

In order to ensure that it can control the look, feel and public perception of UEFA EURO 2012 and to preserve the commercial value of rights of association with UEFA EURO 2012 which are granted to Commercial Partners, UEFA must be sure that it will be able to assert its ownership of its intellectual property and to prohibit unauthorised persons from using it in all relevant markets including, most importantly, in the Host Country. (UEFA, 2004: 14)

This paragraph, written as though it was legal fact, is one that might benefit from a psychoanalytic reading: desiring to be able to control the look, feel and public perception of Euro 2012, UEFA is anxious about its ability to assert ownership of its intellectual property everywhere, but especially, in the host country, because only then can it preserve the commercial value of rights of association. ¹ These rights of association deserve further consideration: what monopoly event organisers want to assure for key partners is exclusivity of association in the partner’s product area: one soft drink, one mobile phone provider, one type of sportswear, one home electronics brand, etc. As Louw describes, such rights of association are habitually protected through contract law on the basis of pacta de non pentendo, an agreement not to prosecute those partners who associate with a given product (Louw, 2012: 39). In writing the requirements into the bidding document, UEFA is asserting that, as a global event, the protection of its property rights and the rights of association linked to them requires that the host country engages to enact special legislation to protect these rights and demonstrate that: ‘the remedies available for breaches of UEFA’s intellectual property rights under the specific legislation enacted to protect UEFA’s intellectual property should be fast and forceful’ (UEFA, 2004: 15).

It is extraordinary for a private entity to require that a state take special measures to secure its property rights over and above the laws existing to secure property rights in a given territory. The way in which this is justified in the Euro 2016 bidding document manifests a similar logic to that used with regard to tax:

UEFA […] requires the appropriate authorities in the bidding countries to classify UEFA EURO 2016 (including the preparatory and planning phases of the tournament as well as the tournament itself) as a matter of public interest in the host country in order to ensure that the organisation of UEFA EURO 2016 takes priority over competing private or local interests. (UEFA, 2008: 52)

The claim that UEFA’s interests are public interests of a higher priority than those of competing private or local interests, or what might otherwise be referred to as the public of a given territory, is a significant moment. For UEFA is enlisting the state’s support in the attempt to ensure the protection of its monopoly on all rights emerging from the event in order to assure monopoly association rights for a given company in a particular field. In so doing, it is attempting to make contractual law between parties enforceable by the state against the public at large (Louw, 2012: 21). Given that the cost of these rights of association are extremely high and thus only available to an elite of multinational companies, what UEFA is effectively requiring is that the host nation state legislates against its own public, referred to as ‘competing private or local interests’.

In the case of South Africa for the 2010 World Cup (Louw, 2012) or Ukraine 2012 (Gindrat, 2012), the governments took the step of introducing special legislation. Poland’s response between 2005–2007 was to offer a series of guarantees to UEFA made by a startlingly wide range of bodies within the Polish state, from the prime minister’s office, through a variety of government ministries (and opposition political parties) to the Polish Football Association and various heads of regional and city government (Włoch, 2012). While Poland did not introduce new legislation with regard to UEFA’s intellectual property, a Ministry of Culture Report from 2009 makes it clear that the strengthening of its control of intellectual property is a key element in Poland’s strategy for becoming a modern European state and that the guarantees made to UEFA are further evidence of this necessity (Ministerstwo kultury i dziedzictwa narodowego (MKiDN), 2009: 96). In order to assure this, the report calls into being a Committee for the Defence of Rights, with representatives from the Patent Bureau, the Ministry of Finance, the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, the police and the Ministry of Justice, especially to advise the Ministry of Sport and Tourism on this matter, while UEFA distributed specially prepared toolkits to host cities (Włoch, 2012).

However, as Louw suggests, the need to stress the self-evidence of these rights and to have them guaranteed by law is contradicted by the difficulty, nay impossibility, of their application. It is surely impossible to control the look, feel and public perception of an event, just as it is to enforce a claim that UEFA is the exclusive owner of all rights related to the Euro. The sound and fury, the special team at the Polish Patent Bureau, the special committee of the defence of rights at the Ministry of Culture, the team of lawyers working as spokesmen for UEFA at Polservice, the intellectual rights team working at the organising committee PL.2012 and the teams working in the host city administrations and the letters to potential offenders are all sent in an attempt to patrol an impossible border, principally in an attempt to convince UEFA’s sponsors that suitable efforts have been made to protect their exclusive rights to associate with the event. Thus, while only UEFA’s official partners were able to associate with the Euro, there was scarcely an advert in Poland in summer 2012 that did not in some way conjure an association with the tournament. Some firms, such as Biedronka, Nike or Warka, were sponsors of the Polish national team and thus had purchased the right to associate with the team – a right which surely competes with the right of exclusive association with Euro 2012 purchased by UEFA’s partners. Other companies, ranging from garden equipment firms advertising by using photos of lawnmowers in a stadium next to footballs in Ukrainian and Polish national colours, to ‘stadium sausages’, to global firms showing their soft drinks in the hands of Polish star players not in their national team kit, to financial services urging us to ‘play together’, all simply used associations with the Euro that in their opinion were loose enough to render the protection of rights invalid (Klimaszewski, 2012). Indeed, the two most remarkable advertising campaigns of the Euro, Nike’s advert with the massed ranks of the European footballers it sponsors running into a stadium or the Tyskie brewery’s half soap-opera half-advert ‘The Fifth Stadium’, repeated ad nauseam on Polish television, were not officially linked to the Euro in any way.

The question of intellectual property is one that once more poses questions about borders and ownership, access and scarcity which, as the widespread protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) agreement in Poland in February 2012 indicated, have far-reaching implications for a reconfiguration of justice, profit and citizenship. The very term ‘ambush marketing’ conjures the frontier territory of the wild west. Mega-events are a significant and evolving element of this recalibration, whereby with each event new modalities for protecting their monopoly are sought. In the case of Poland, it is alarming that the Minister of Culture can view the attempt to legislate against the public in defence of UEFA’s legally dubious rights as a significant step in the path of belonging to the European community of nations. UEFA, meanwhile, seeks to reinforce this delicate operation by pursuing cooperation with the EU in championing a European model of sport, whereby:

UEFA is a European body and we remain totally committed to the European model of sport, a model characterised by promotion and relegation, the solidarity principle, as well as open competitions and opportunity for all. This is what sport – and especially football – is all about. We have to protect this model because sport is not simply a business like any other and we cannot allow it to be treated as such. (UEFA, 2012)

UEFA cites the specificity of sport as the reason for not treating it as a business like any other. Of course, sport has many aspects that are not business related and trying to rescue these, as concerns many other aspects of the fruits of human labour, is currently a serious political and theoretical challenge (Jessop, 2002). However, in asserting its role as custodian of a European model based on competition and opportunity for all, UEFA is simultaneously justifying its position as a ‘monopoly regulator with inherent market dominance’ (Louw, 2012: 30), ensuring there is opportunity for no one unless it is with their specific permission. Thus, claims to governance and an ethical adherence to a superior European mode of sporting conduct are used as the logic for erecting new barriers to protect business interests because they are not a business like any other. The frontier between business and non-business, or business as usual and the specificity of a business not like any other, is an area where many businesses would like to stake a claim, as evidenced by the proliferation of charitable foundations acting under the auspices of major companies. This confusing of business and non-business interests is a characteristic feature of neoliberalism’s reconfiguration of state/market relations: for, as businesses move into ever wider areas of social life, cases in which it is necessary to treat a business not like any other multiply. As will be discussed in the next section, international consulting firms are skilled in exploiting this new paradigm.

UEFA (and the IOC and The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)) do genuinely have a double role, as custodians of the interests of sport at an international level and private companies making a huge revenue on their monopolies by forcing nation states to legislate to protect the private interests of global enterprises against the public. Louw (2012) and Hall (2006) note that nation states willingly comply and that the legal exceptions made for mega-events are becoming a norm. In terms of the Euro in Poland and Ukraine, it is important to stress the mechanisms through which UEFA functions since the majority of accusations of corruption and state capture surrounding this event were aimed at Ukraine. The point is not to underestimate the seriousness of domestic political issues within Ukraine, but to argue that they need to be considered in relation to an evolving international context. It is thus important to state that mega-event organisers are non-democratic organisations that govern through manipulating events as a scarce commodity by engaging states in the preservation of their monopoly rights in increasingly strict, and not entirely coherent or successful, ways.

From the perspective of the post-socialist states of Eastern Europe, the abuse of position of monopoly regulator and producer in order to manipulate governance through scarcity and the associated paradigms of influence, intrigue and regulation avoidance carry echoes of everyday practice under state socialism (Ledeneva, 1998, 2008). This article argues that Euro 2012 suggests that modes of governance prevalent under state socialism did not disappear in 1991, they jumped scale. The manipulations practised by the communist regimes of Eastern Europe against their citizens are, under neoliberalism, exercised by global monopoly owners against nation states. The arguments of corruption that dog FIFA and UEFA are not really the issue (although it is an interesting element in the parallel being drawn that the most influential figure in Poland and Ukraine’s successful bid for Euro 2012 was the charismatic oligarch and UEFA member Hryhory Surkis and that Gazprom has recently become a UEFA partner), the exertion of influence through limited access to scarcity is inherently part of the mode of operation. In terms of UEFA, it is noteworthy that the right to regulate its monopoly is underwritten by an appeal to a uniquely European model of sport, while the Polish government also frames its protection of monopoly rights in terms of being a modern European nation. In both cases, this reference suggests an ambivalent role for Europe in the rescalings of monopolies underway.

Reconfiguring state/private interests

As mentioned above, the recalibration of business/non-business introduced by Euro 2012 involves a pivotal role played by specialist agents able to act as intermediaries between international monopoly regulators and nation states. Much has been written about the role of a mobile service class in promoting and diffusing the ideas of neoliberalism internationally (Peck, 2002, 2011; Oancă 2015), while Drahokoupil (2009) has pinpointed the emergence of a local comprador service class, whose interests are dependent on those of international capital, as the crucial element in the transformation of the EU states of Eastern Europe from an inwardly oriented mode of capitalism during the 1990s into the champions of neoliberal competition that they have become today. As will be discussed below, local branches of the big four accountancy firms play such a crucial role in all phases of the preparation, organisation and reporting on of Euro 2012 that the division between the state and the private interests of these companies becomes hard to distinguish. Crucially, these agents that promote the discourse of competition-oriented economic strategies are themselves engaged in the active cultivation of influence and attracting of state commissions. The invisible role of their business interests in shaping contemporary forms of statehood and the types of investment deemed desirable and possible by states, as demonstrated by their profound but subtle influence at the Euro, has a wide-reaching influence on horizons of spatial transformation in today’s Eastern Europe.

In autumn 2012, PL.2012, the quango established by the Polish government to organise Euro 2012, received an award and a glowing report from the firm Deloitte for its outstanding management of the Euro 2012 project, demonstrating how much the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) system purchased from CA Technologies had saved in the organisation of Euro 2012: over 70m złoty (€16m) in a figure arrived at by calculating savings in time, cost, volume, synergy and future benefits (Deloitte, 2012b). On Deloitte’s website, meanwhile, we can read that Deloitte has been delivering valuable business solutions utilising CA Technologies’ software for over 10 years (Deloitte, 2012a). They are also leaders in the development of PPM approaches having advised at the South Africa World Cup and London Olympics, and have the highest number of personnel qualified with a Project Management Institute (PMI) Certificate (Deloitte, 2012b: 71). The report also stresses that, due to an open clause in the project agreement, the costs for parties wishing to employ the CA Clarity system to organise future events could be up to 50% cheaper. Thus, the work done for Euro 2012 will bring further cost-cutting benefits, and hence also functions as an advertisement for using CA Technologies’, and Deloitte’s, services in the future.

Deloitte have also published a report describing the higher than expected profits made by the four host cities of the Euro, news which was subsequently widely broadcast in the Polish media, while these activities were supplemented by senior managers appearing at conferences in Poznań and Gdańsk to discuss the after-effects of Euro 2012. Deloitte also acted as consultants to the city authorities in both Poznań and Wrocław for the development programmes for the future use of the stadia there (PR News, 2012), and in addition the UEFA delegation in Poland for the two years prior to and during the Euro had their headquarters in Deloitte House in Warsaw, where the Polish Football Association-appointed/UEFA-controlled firm Euro 2012 Polska also had their office (Legionisci, 2012). Deloitte’s involvement in the preparations for the Euro dated from far earlier, however, as indicated in a report by the firm commissioned by the Ministry of Regional Development in 2007. This involved advising the ministry both on the demands and protocol generally employed by UEFA and on which investments for Euro 2012 might qualify for support from EU funds and under what conditions (Deloitte, 2007).

It was PricewaterhouseCoopers, meanwhile, that was responsible for consulting on the preparation of the successful bid to host the Euro. They too specialise in advising the public sector on applications for EU funds. Ernst & Young have also been upbeat about the Euro publishing how it can boost Poland’s rating in ‘Soft Power’ rankings or asserting in their Spring 2012 rapid growth markets report that the Euro could help Poland avoid recession (subsequent versions of this report are not so optimistic), while they have a specialist interest in developing the business environment of the Polish Football Premier League, publishing annual audits and offering financial advice. Ernst & Young also runs an Efficient State programme during the course of which, in June 2009, they organised a debate concerning the Euro, ‘Are We Ready?’, with the participation of the then Minister of Sport. KPMG, meanwhile, focused on the question of Poland’s stadia, performing a detailed comparative analysis with other European stadia and providing advice about how to use the new infrastructure potential they provide.

In his analysis of London 2012, Raco foregrounds the role played by the big four accountancy firms in creating a new regulatory environment around the Olympics, where the divides between private and public are blurred to the point that private companies bid in tenders on behalf of the state (Raco, 2012: 453). Two aspects of Raco’s argument are especially relevant for reflecting on the situation in Poland. Firstly, mega-events are a multi-faceted process of organisation where ‘governance has become a more technical process, managed by contract-writers, lawyers and accountants. Public agencies are reduced to the role of “intelligent clients” who draw on expensive or seconded “technical advisers” and “advice” to ensure that they are being compliant with contractual and regulatory procedures’ (Raco, 2012: 452). This David Levi-Faur, quoted in Raco, describes as an emerging mode of ‘regulatory capitalism’ where the state is actively involved in regulating the contractual requirements of private enterprises, and vice-versa, and in which democracy becomes more indirect as elected representatives’ roles are reduced to those of controlling and supervising experts ‘who formulate and administer policies in an autonomous fashion from their regulatory bastions’ (Levi-Faur, 2005: 13). Secondly, this new regulatory situation is part of a wider trend in which private elites are emerging who have become entrepreneurial in obtaining contractual rights to public projects, welfare assets and services, since the risks of failure involved in traditional forms of private sector activity are deemed too high. Thus, regulatory capitalism refers to a scenario of complex overlap and interaction between states and major corporations, perhaps suggesting a further dimension to the reassertion of state interests which Müller (2011) sees as a distinguishing feature of mega-events in Eastern Europe.

In the light of Raco’s analysis of the London Olympics, it appears significant not just that the big four have also played a major role in organising the Euro in Poland, but that their expertise in advising the government to a great extent provides the frame through which the event is perceived. These firms work on behalf of the state producing the bidding documents that enable the successful application to hold the mega-event, hold discussions to question whether we are ready, advise how the state can use European funds, host the UEFA delegation and then produce reports to illustrate how profitable the event was for Polish cities. Thus, the mega-event is transformed not into a question of politics: but of organisation, coordination and efficiency in order to make maximum use of an opportunity that will reap benefits for the nation in the long run. The fact that consultancy firms variously advise different levels of state, international business and sports’ regulators is not perceived as a problem because of the positing of the need to organise a successful event as all-important. The question of the revenues raised by consultancy firms is never mentioned. Likewise the quango PL.2012 is in essence a body where public and private interests and financing blur: it may simply be a coincidence that the public relations specialist working at PL.2012 previously worked for the public relations firm that organised Coca-Cola’s Poland advertising campaign for the Euro, involving promotion events in partnership with the city of Warsaw. Or equally that the director of PL.2012 moved to the job from Lotos, a company to whom the city of Gdańsk looked to help share the costs of financing stadium construction and that is still one of the potential candidates for sponsoring the National Stadium in Warsaw: a task that this director is now in charge of overseeing.

The technicalisation of governance and the intermingling of private and public interest in the role of the big four accountancy firms in advising the state makes critique extremely difficult. However, it is important to use the moment of the Euro to illustrate ways in which, despite the Balcerowicz reforms of the early 1990s, the Polish economy is not following a free market path. Moreover, it is those who proclaim the value of free market competition, multinational accountancy firms, who are best positioned to make use of government commissions and advise the state on how to conduct themselves in relation to international bodies, such as UEFA or the EU. The impact of these hidden agendas on the production of space in Poland today is difficult to gauge, but equally difficult to underestimate.

Conclusion

The collapse of state socialism cannot be separated from radical upheavals in the mode of spatial organisation and capital accumulation in the contemporary world. These changes left post-socialist states at a double disadvantage: their modes of urbanisation were outmoded, and they were also behind in a newly emerging paradigm where attention is a generator of value. It is within this panoply of uneven attention that mega-events provide what appears to be a unique opportunity to alter the place of the spaces of Eastern Europe in the global playing field.

However, this paper has argued that Euro 2012 can best be understood as a reconfiguration of monopoly at the heart of the spectacular excess of global sport. Governance through scarcity becomes a pioneering wedge in subordinating nation states to the behest of international bodies that use their position as monopoly regulators to maximise their profit as private enterprises. Thus, states in Eastern Europe make enormous investments in the fixed capital of infrastructure for international governing bodies to reap the benefits of the mobile marketing economy. The effect is to reinforce different speeds of return of income: UEFA has prepaid tax-free revenue on television, sponsorship and tickets, while Poland gathers the side expenses of football fans (money not spent on the purchase of products from UEFA partners in fan zones) and hopes that the long-term returns on its accelerated infrastructure investment and improved brand ranking outweigh the negative effects of interest on debts accrued to finance it and other random factors in the world economy. Such hopes are contradicted by the ways the event reinforces uneven spatial relations in the present, thus undermining the temporal narrative of increased modernisation.

Rather than being a step towards modernisation, Euro 2012 demonstrates neoliberalism in Poland as occurring through an ongoing reconfiguration of regulation, monopoly and intrigue. In this context, the consulting firms and quangos can be framed as the tolkachiki described by Alena Ledeneva (2009) as key figures in Soviet factory environments, framing the discourse within which projects are bid for and presented, and enabling access to and distribution of limited resources. Ex-party officials in the firm Euro 2012 Polska did manage to find ways to cooperate with the new-style business managers in PL.2012 and their counterparts at UEFA in order to get the job done. In the contemporary configuration of deregulation and reregulation, or self-contradictory regulation in denial (Peck, 2010), manipulation of monopoly is no longer the privilege of the state over its citizens, but an advancing inter-scalar phenomenon reinforcing hierarchies of uneven spatial development (Brenner, 2009). This is the configuration that statehood in Eastern Europe has to confront.

The vision of statehood that emerges from this analysis is complex. For while the intercalation of the state in commercial processes is intensifying, this is taking on forms that can be better analysed in terms of multi-scalar recalibrations of monopoly and influence, than the extension of market competition. In this configuration, the state is drawn into actions of dubious legality, logic and effectiveness in an effort to maintain a mediating role as capitalist enterprises in the era of globalisation seek new ways to extract monopoly rents. The contradictions thus inherent are likely to grow more extensive with consequences that will need further analysis. The situation is all the more serious in Poland, because of a perception, made explicit by both UEFA and the Polish state, of Euro 2012 as a part of a wider European civilisational project. All the big four have projects advising how to access EU funds, with their advice equally available for both private and state institutions. Thus, as in the case of the Euro, the prevailing premise that modernisation is being carried out to enable future growth may turn out to be less significant than using this moment of European funding and state commissions to maximise private profit in an environment where other forms of investment are too risky.