As the song goes, football is coming home in 2016. The 15th UEFA European Football Championships will be hosted in France, as it did the first time in 1960 as well as 1984. This championship will be exceptional because from now on there will be 24 teams competing for the title in comparison to 16 as it was since UEFA Euro 1996 in England.

Naturally, the majority of teams (13 out of 16) will be coming back from the UEFA Euro 2012 but a new format means that 13 more teams will be able to enter the competition including 2008 co-hosts Austria and Switzerland, Turkey, Romania while other nine teams have different stories.

The competition will be held throughout 10 cities: Bordeaux, Lens, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Paris, Saint-Etienne, Saint-Denis and Toulouse. Although an increase in games from 31 to 51, an extra knock-out stage seems great for the revenues of the organizers and fans, there are more and more opinions that this 31-day championship may be extremely hard on the players.

Even though every championship ever has taught as about the unpredictability of the tournament, by glancing at some of the groups you can predict the outcome. However, some groups seem extremely interesting in that regard. In my opinion, Group A (Albania, France, Romania, Switzerland) and Group D are impossible to predict beyond the winner while groups E (Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Sweden) and F (Austria, Hungary, Island, Portugal) are the most intriguing of all. It should turnout great for betting sites because of unpredictability and Swedish people could gamble on sports instead of playing at online casinos.

The mascot of the UEFA Euro 2016 is Super Victor (a boy who gained super powers after he found a cape, a ball and boots) and the official football is Beau Jeu by Adidas. The logo of the championship is dedicated to Hendri Delaunay. There will also be a dedicated video game, UEFA Euro 2016. It will be developed by Konami and offered for free for all Pro Evolution Soccer video game owners.