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A European Championship is the top level international sports competition between European athletes or sports teams representing their respective countries or professional sports clubs.
In the plural, the European Championships also refers to a specific combined quadrennial multi-sport event featuring the continental championships for athletics, aquatics, artistic gymnastics, triathlon, rowing, cycling and team golf.
Since European championships are usually open for teams or individual athletes from countries which are members of European sports organisations and some member countries are only partly or not at all situated in the European continent, some non-Europeans also usually take part in these championships. Traditionally, sports teams from Armenia, Georgia, Cyprus and Israel – all geographically outside Europe – are included in European competitions for cultural and political reasons, while trans-continental countries Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkey (which straddle Europe and Asia), and technically Iceland (which sits on a continental fault line in the Atlantic ocean) and Malta (between Europe and Africa in the Mediterranean) also compete in Europe.
A number of countries maintain departments outside the European continent, but which are considered an integral part of their mother country, including France (e.g. Guadeloupe and New Caledonia), Denmark (Greenland), Spain (e.g. the Canaries) and the Netherlands (the former Netherlands Antilles). Athletes and club teams from these regions are typically eligible for European championships. The overseas territories of the United Kingdom, however, are usually not included unless an individual athlete has transferred allegiance completely to the UK or one of its home nations. The British overseas territory of Gibraltar competes separately in lower tier European championship competition in rugby union and football.
In addition, in football, under UEFA, but not in other sports, the Asian country of Kazakhstan also competes in European competition for historical reasons, while South African clubs participate in the top-level club championship in European rugby union called European Rugby Champions Cup.
The United Kingdom and Ireland compete in different configurations depending upon the sport in question; in team field sports, the home nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (a combined team from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) is the dominant configuration (except soccer and netball, where the two jurisdictions in Ireland compete separately), while in most individual sports, particularly Olympic sports, athletes represent 'Great Britain and Northern Ireland', often shortened to Great Britain (the description 'United Kingdom' is rarely used), and Ireland, with Northern Ireland athletes eligible for either.
