Italy v Turkey: Uefa could hardly have chosen a better location to open Euro 2020

When football eventually comes home, it may be to Rome, scene of Friday's Euro 2020 opener between Italy and Turkey... which has a bit of history attached, as Colm Greaves explains

General view of the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. Picture: Nick Potts/PA Wire.

Seven kilometres from the Stadio Olympico in Rome, the venue for Friday's opening clash of the Euro 2020 championship, lie the ruins of the Circus Maximus and all its silent ghosts. The first and biggest sports arena of the ancient world, this is where emperors, senators, citizens, plebs and slaves came to drink, yell, eat, gamble, grumble, marvel, laugh and sometimes die.

These days it’s a serene public park but there was a time when crowds of 200,000 packed into the ‘largest circuit’ to watch sports meetings that could carry on for weeks. That’s three times the capacity of the Olympic stadium which normally seats 70,000 fans but is restricted to just a quarter of that for the Friday's premiere between Italy and Turkey.