Statement from IWBF Europe President and Executive Council
13 March 2020
IWBF Europe Executive Council has continued to very carefully monitor the situation of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) threat in Europe after our statement on 4th March 2020.
It is obvious that the situation with Coronavirus is not improving at this time and in many places more restrictions on travel and social gatherings are being made every day.
Many national federations have taken the decision to suspend or cancel leagues and tournaments and we have continued to consider the views and information from players, teams and technical officials.
IWBF Europe focus remains to protect the health and wellbeing of athletes, technical officials in this difficult situation and the Executive Council of IWBF Europe has again carefully considered how this impacts the plans for EuroCup weekends in April and May 2020.
In order to protect our athletes and technical officials, we have made the difficult final decision to cancel all planned EuroCup events for the remainder of the 2019/20 season.
This means that the EuroLeague Finals, Champions League Final 4 and EuroCup 2021 Qualification Tournament are all cancelled.
Any decision to cancel a competition is never an easy decision, and we regret that we have to make such a choice, but we make it to protect the health of our membership.
We look forward to holding again EuroCup in 2021.
IWBF Europe continues to prepare for the European Championships U22 Men in August and Division B Men and Women in September, but will keep close attention on Coronavirus developments. We are hopeful that both events will be able to take place as planned, but we will immediately inform all our members if the situation changes. To keep our members up to date IWBF Europe will send informational emails regularly, and place articles on our website.
Walter Pfaller – President
Petr Tuček – Secretary General