Next year’s European Football Championship is scheduled to open with a major concert on the Theresienwiese. The celebration is scheduled to begin in the early evening of June 12, 2024, two days before the opening game in the arena in Fröttmaning. Around 80,000 visitors could watch the show. The artist is currently not being publicly named due to a requirement from the organizing agency. However, we can hear from the town hall that Ed Sheeran would be confident of attracting so many people to Theresienwiese. But no one wants to officially confirm the artist.
The plans for the opening of the Euro 2024 emerge from a submission from the economic department to the city council, which has already been submitted to the district committees around Theresienwiese for comment. According to the paper, a “cultural opening festival for all fans” will take place in Munich on June 12th, with a big concert as the highlight, sung by an “international pop music superstar”. If the space on Theresienwiese is not available, the opening ceremony will probably go to Berlin, the paper says.
The Theresienwiese is not without controversy as a concert location; in the summer of 2022 there were heated discussions about a planned New Year’s Eve concert by the band Rammstein. The city council gave its approval in principle, but the major event could no longer be implemented in just a few months. This time the organizing agency would have just under eight months. The city council is again in a generally positive mood if the necessary requirements were met.
In any case, the SPD parliamentary group is open about it, as was the case with the Rammstein idea. “In this particular case, we think a concert in the run-up to the opening game on the Theresienwiese would be fine. That would be a nice start to the fan festivals in the city,” said chairwoman Anne Hübner. The city of Munich has often shown that it can host major events, for example at the 2006 World Cup or last year at the European Championships. “We are therefore really looking forward to the 2024 European Football Championship.”
The Social Democrat had a special request for the performance of the music star at Euro 2024. “We would like it even better if the tickets weren’t too expensive, so that people with smaller budgets and young people also had the chance to go to the concert.” The Greens want to get a more detailed picture first and are not yet committed to the current state of knowledge. CSU parliamentary group leader Manuel Pretzl reacted with positive surprise to the plans he was not yet aware of. “Very spontaneously I say: Euro 2024 would be good, Ed Sheeran would be good, Theresienwiese would be good.”
Euro 2024 organizers are said to have originally had the Olympic Stadium in mind for their cultural opening ceremony. The Olympic Park Society confirms such a request. But according to the city’s draft resolution, the organizers of the opening ceremony did not manage to make the binding commitment in time. That’s why there will most likely be a concert spectacle in Munich at the opening of Euro 2024: Ed Sheeran will play on the Theresienwiese, and the Olympic Stadium will play AC/DC booked for the day. This concert has not yet been officially confirmed, but the town hall is expecting this duo to take place on June 12th.
Economics officer Clemens Baumgärtner (CSU) thinks the concert request for the Theresienwiese is good and wants to present it to the city council next week. The development occurred over the summer and is only now ready for a decision. So that there is enough time to prepare for the concert, things have to happen quickly. Baumgärtner expects it to have great advertising value for the city. The stage should be set so that Bavaria with the Hall of Fame can be seen in pictures and videos. The Munich landmarks would be shown worldwide during a live broadcast of the opening ceremony.
Due to the few facts known so far, the surrounding district committees are cautious in their comments. So far we only know the planned positioning of the stage, nothing else. People are not fundamentally against concerts on Theresienwiese, but it is also heavily used for non-commercial purposes in the summer. The local committees want to continue to work towards this. If “a quarter of the total area” is closed for set-up and dismantling for 15 days for a single evening, that would be an enormous disruption.
So far, only the Left/The Party faction has expressed direct opposition. “Instead of the major events that the economic advisor imagines, we want to enable a wide range of non-commercial events on Munich’s Theresienwiese,” said spokesman Stefan Jagel.