This site was ESPN’s opportunity to make an impression with the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) and show that inside the U.S. the popular cable network had the ability to generate interest in a sport—even when there is no American participation. It’s a concrete example of ESPN's effort to generate interest by creating a place for fans to explore and learn more about the tournament and participating teams.

Since the tournament featured only European countries, the site includes a team selector tool with background information on each country to help U.S. fans choose favorite teams. RSS newsfeeds of top team stories allowed for up-to-the-second syndication. Mobile alert tie-ins allowed users to get the latest EURO2008 news anywhere, anytime.

In addition to a standard navigation highlighting the key areas of the site, content is served up almost as a secondary navigation device to introduce users to deeper content areas. Flash deep linking gave visitors the ability to return effortlessly to any page of the site—a particularly useful feature when the content isn’t familiar.

• It took a team of eight, eight weeks to develop the site.

• Considering the amount of content, the framework of the site is lightweight (<200k) and almost fully vector-based.
 
• The site has 24 videos, 50 images and media clips of the national anthems for each team.

• One master .swf file was used to handle all section logic and deep linking and approximately 25 XML files hold much of the regular content in the site.

• The site worked in conjunction with a print and broadcast campaign for U.S. fans who wanted deeper engagement with EURO2008.