UEFA secretary and Ebbe Schwartz the first president. The current president is Aleksander Čeferin, a former Football Association of Slovenia president, who was elected as UEFA's seventh president at the 12th Extraordinary UEFA Congress in Athens in September 2016, and automatically became a vice-president of the world body FIFA. UEFA was founded on 15 June 1954 in Basel, Switzerland after consultation between the Italian, French, and Belgian associations. The European football union began with 25 members; that number doubled by the early 1990s. Until 1959 the main headquarters were located in Paris, and later in Bern. In 1995, UEFA headquarters were
UEFA European Championship the 1982, 1986 and 1990 World Cups had been European, whereas the European Championship finals still involved only eight teams. For 2016, the competition has increased to 24 teams. In 2007, there was much discussion about an expansion of the tournament to 24 teams, started by Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, due to the increased number of football associations in Europe after the break-ups of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and the inclusion of Israel and Kazakhstan. The new president of UEFA, Michel Platini, was reported to be in favour of expansion which proved an accurate assumption. Whilst