The Complainant is the well-known governing body for association football in Europe. It is one of six continental confederations. UEFA consists of 55 national association members.
UEFA represents the national football associations of Europe and runs national team and club competitions including the UEFA European Football Championship, UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, and UEFA Super Cup, and controls the prize money, regulations, and media rights to those competitions.
The UEFA European Football Championship was founded in 1960 and is the primary association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of UEFA. It has been held every four years thereafter and starting with the 1984 tournament specific championships have been referred to as the “UEFA EURO [year of championship]” or simply the “EURO [year of championship]”.
In the case of the 1984 tournament the form this name took was “EURO 84”, and in subsequent years the names used have been “EURO 88”, “EURO 92”, “EURO 96”, “EURO 2000”, “EURO 2004”, “EURO 2008”, “EURO 2012”, “EURO 2016”, and for the future “EURO 2020” and “EURO 2024”. In each case the name was used to refer to the tournament many years prior to the date of the tournament itself. For example, the name “EURO 2000” was in use since at least 1997 with the draw for the tournament taking place in January 1998, in Belgium.
The Complainant’s EURO Football tournaments are world famous and are particularly famous in Europe. Submitted evidence shows accumulated TV audience figures for the EURO 2016 Final Tournament on a global basis of 9,977,678,655.
The “EUROs” are the second most watched football tournament in the world after the FIFA World Cup. The EURO 2016 final match was watched by a global audience of around 173.5 million alone.
The Complainant has registered since at least 1993 a large number of trade marks in the UK, Europe and around the world that either comprise or incorporate the term “EURO” followed by a number representing the year of the tournament, inter alia the union trademark EURO2024, No. 011322351 applied for on November 6, 2012 in several classes.
In addition to the registered rights identified above and by reason of the Complainant’s very extensive use of the terms “EURO 84”, “EURO 88”, “EURO 92”, “EURO 96”, “EURO 2000”, “EURO 2004”, “EURO 2008”, “EURO 2012”, “EURO 2016” and also by reason of its use of the terms “EURO 2020” and “EURO 2024” the Complainant claims to has developed very substantial goodwill in each of those terms and more generally any term that takes the form “EURO 20XX” where “20XX” represents a year in which the tournament takes place.
The disputed domain name has been registered in 1999. The parties dispute whether the Respondent was from the beginning, as the Respondent claims, and continuously proprietor of the disputed domain name or not, as the Complainant claims.
In the years between 2007 and 2017, the disputed domain name was used for a website that appears to have been generated by a domain name “pay-per-click” service. The form of the display of those webpages related inter alia to football, later on also to other sports blogs, and lately a twitter feed under the twitter name “EURO2024” was added on the website whereas the related tweets were not completely, but to a certain extent football related.
The Respondent never disputed that he was aware of the term EURO 2024 being the name of the Complainant´s tournament in the year 2024.
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