Michele Uva has been appointed Executive Director of Euro 2032 Italy by bosses at UEFA.
Uva was elected to the UEFA Executive Committee in 2017 and has most recently been UEFA Executive Director of Social & Environmental Sustainability.
He has spearheaded efforts to lower the climate footprint of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).
Thanks to his leadership, UEFA incorporated sustainability into the strategic planning for the 2024 European Football Championship in Germany.
During his tenure at the organisation, Uva has served as UEFA vice president and chair of the Club Licensing Committee and as a member of the Finance, Club Competitions, Strategic Steering and Women’s Football Committees and the Professional Football Strategy Council.
The 2032 UEFA European Football Championship, commonly referred to as UEFA Euro 2032 or simply Euro 2032, will be the 19th UEFA European Championship, the quadrennial international football championship organised by UEFA for the senior men’s national teams of its member associations.
Italy and Turkey will host the tournament, which is expected to take place between June and July 2032.
The European Championship is the third-largest multi-day sporting event in the world after the Summer Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup, with a cumulative global television audience of 5.4 billion viewers.
The most recent edition, held in Germany, generated more than €7.5 billion for the host cities and welcomed three million fans in stadiums, in addition to six million supporters who attended the various fan zones.
Those fans came from 190 different countries, highlighting the truly global nature of the event.
Michele Uva is a sports manager with skills in the areas of company restructuring, business development and sustainability coupled with a strategic focus on complex organisations, including transparency and accountability processes.
He has dedicated his entire career to professional sport across several contexts, disciplines and environments, notably as CEO of sports organisations including the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) and Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) as well as professional football clubs (Parma FC and SS Lazio), basketball clubs (Virtus Roma) and volleyball clubs (Zinella Volley Bologna, Volley Treviso and PVF Matera).
He has also provided his services as an expert consultant in sports management and company reorganisations around the world.
A graduate of the University of Bologna, Uva has authored six books on the sport and football industry, most recently Soldi vs Idee, published in 2023, and has been invited to speak at COP28, the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos and the UN Global Refugee Forum.
He currently lectures on several master’s programmes at universities and institutions around the world and is UEFA’s Director of Social & Environmental Sustainability, having been appointed in January 2021. In this role, he produced the organisation’s Football Sustainability Strategy 2030: Strength through Unity.
Uva said, “A special thank you to my President, Aleksander Ceferin, for giving me these opportunities and to Secretary General Theodore Theodoridis.
“My thanks to my UEFA sustainability team, to the sustainability managers of the national associations, leagues and clubs, to my UEFA colleagues and to all stakeholders who have accompanied me in this journey.”
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