UEFA Headquarters (Europe’s highest governing body) has moved locations several times. UEFA was indeed formed in Basel, Switzerland, in 1954. However, its first headquarters is located in Paris, France. It was only in December 1959 that UEFA’s headquarters moved to Bern, the capital of Switzerland. In Bern alone, the location of the UEFA Headquarters moved twice, namely in 1962 and 1974. After 35 years based in Bern, UEFA moved their headquarters again. This time to Nyon, a city with a population of 15 thousand at that time.
The new headquarters, however, was only a temporary office. The building alone belongs to Providentia, an insurance company. UEFA leased a wing of the Providentia building while waiting for the actual UEFA Headquarters, also located in Nyon, to be completed. The La Colline land sale and purchase agreement was signed by UEFA and Nyon city officials on 6 July 1993. It is on this land located on the outskirts of the city that the UEFA Headquarters was built. Officially, UEFA began to occupy this headquarters on 22 September 1999. Until now UEFA is still based there.
More or less, UEFA’s decision not to stay in one location was influenced by the inability of the headquarters building to accommodate the number of employees. If the number of UEFA employees is too many for the current headquarters, it is not impossible that UEFA Headquarters will move again. Like UEFA, the FIFA Headquarters (world football’s highest body) is also located in Switzerland. He is much younger, because it was only inaugurated on 27 May 2007. Of course, like UEFA, FIFA has also moved its headquarters location several times. Located in one of the most prestigious areas of Zurich, FIFA Headquarters is privileged. The city government allows the road where the FIFA Headquarters is located is named FIFA-Strasse – FIFA Street, in Indonesian.
On the surface, the FIFA office is a transparent glass building. Sepp Blatter, FIFA President at the time, said that the glass building was meant to “give light in and create the transparency that we all hold dear.” We know it’s a lie. The building itself is a lie. The glass building, after all, is a statement of transparency. However, by tiering underground, FIFA has become a closed organization. The Executive Committee Meeting Room, located on the third underground floor, was a very closed room.
There, important decisions are made, but the room itself does not reflect openness. “The space where decisions are made should only be illuminated by indirect light,” Blatter said. “Because the light has to come from the people themselves, from the people gathered in the meeting room.” brag.
The Olympic rings adorn almost every part of Lausanne, the international sporting capital. In Lausanne, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) is headquartered. FIFA and UEFA are not the only sports bodies based in Switzerland. Since the IOC’s founding in Lausanne in 1915 to date, nearly 50 international sporting bodies have established their headquarters in Switzerland. The highest bodies for gymnastics, cycling, volleyball, basketball, handball, skiing, ice hockey and more, all converge in Switzerland. Even the Court of Arbitration for Sport is located in Switzerland.
“The tradition of hosting international organizations can be traced back to the 1920s, when the League of Nations was founded in Geneva,” says Jean-Loup Chappelet, an expert in sports organization management at the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration, Lausanne. “After the IOC, other sporting bodies like UEFA and FIFA naturally looked to Switzerland.”
Lausanne itself was chosen as the location of the IOC by Pierre de Coubertin, one of its founders. De Coubertin’s reasoning at the time was: Lausanne was located in a picturesque town on the shores of Lake Geneva and, being located in Switzerland, Lausanne was far from the chaos of World War I. Switzerland, the oldest neutral country in the world, did not take part in World Wars, neither the first nor the second. For more than 200 years they were absent from any kind of war. Their last war was against Napoleon in 1815.
There is a reason why this country located in the middle of Europe is rarely invited to war. Although the country is surrounded by aggressive states, such as France (to the west), Germany (north), Austria (east), and Italy (to the south), Switzerland has a challenging geography. In the South is the enormous Alps that separates Switzerland from Italy and Austria. Meanwhile to the West and North were the Jura Mountains, a mountain range not as large as the Alps but still more than enough to separate them from France.
Then there is the Swiss plateau, Mitteland, in the middle of their country which is stretched from west to east which contains hills with many rivers and lakes. This area contains the majority of Switzerland’s population, including major cities such as Geneva, Bern and Zurich.
It is so safe, in addition, even if there is now a nuclear war, Switzerland is the only country that is safe because they have enough nuclear fallout shelters for their entire population (8.5 million people) and still leaves room to spare. fit to accommodate about 1.2 million more souls for the others.
The country which has a unique flag dimension (1:1) is also not a member of the European Union in order to maintain neutrality. In addition, Switzerland is also not a member of NATO and even joined the United Nations in 2002.
Meanwhile, Piermarco Zen-Ruffinen, a sports law specialist at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, argues that Switzerland is attractive for many reasons (some of which have been described above): geographic location, highly skilled workforce, political stability, neutrality, security, quality. life, and, of course, interesting tax rules.
ASL
