The UK will host the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 — on behalf of Ukraine — after the British Broadcasting Corp. accepted a European Broadcasting Union invitation to stage the 67th edition of the annual competition.
It didn’t take long after this week’s announcement for a handful of UK city councils to offer to host the event. London, Manchester and Sheffield are among the English cities making bids. In Scotland, Glasgow and Aberdeen have also confirmed their interest.
As the UK’s national broadcaster, the BBC has published a programming plan for the event with a bidding process to select the venue set to begin this week. The aim is for it to be complete by the autumn.
Since the EBU started talks with the BBC last month, Glasgow has become the bookmakers’ favorite. The city, which staged the Commonwealth Games in 2014 and hosted the COP26 climate summit in 2021, is at odds of 5/6 with Paddy Power.
Manchester, London, Birmingham and Liverpool make up the rest of the bookmaker’s top five possible host cities. Paddy Power will pay out £5 for every £1 placed on London, and £14 for every £1 on Liverpool to win the bid. Manchester is 6/4, and Birmingham is 5/1 at William Hill. Of the five, only London and Birmingham have ever hosted the contest, London four times and Birmingham just once, in 1998.
Read more via Bloomberg News/BBC/The Scotsman
