UEFA mucking up successful euro championships

Last Sunday, Europe’s national football teams, and one or two that might more properly be considered part of the Middle East or Asia, discovered who they’ll be playing in 2019, as they strive to reach Euro 2020. The sport’s continental governing body, UEFA, has devised a qualification process of baffling complexity for a tournament final that will be contested across no fewer than 12 host countries.

In their wisdom, they’ve managed to turn one of the world’s great sporting competitions into a sprawling, confused mess and the format has already been ditched in favour of a more compact setup for 2024. However, football fans are used to wrestling with statistical and organisational complexity. It’s just possible that they’ll be able to understand the various routes to a tournament that makes Brexit negotiations look simple by comparison.

First – the (relatively) simple part. The draw was conducted in Dublin on Sunday and the teams were divided into 10 qualifying groups, consisting of 5 or 6 teams each. As is traditional, England was drawn against less challenging opponents than the rest of the home nations. Gareth Southgate’s men will play against an assortment of struggling countries from the former soviet-Bloc; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Kosovo.

The Scots’ task is much harder – which will be no more than they expected. Alex McLeish’s charges drew Belgium, Russia, Cyprus, Kazakhstan and San Marino. Wales will face the World Cup finalists Croatia, as well as Slovakia, Hungary and Azerbaijan.

Northern Ireland is in the so-called ‘group of death’, that includes the Netherlands, Germany, Estonia and Belarus. And that was where even the time-worn ritual of drawing teams out of a hat (or a large transparent bowl in this case) got complicated.

Initially, it was the Republic of Ireland that was chosen to face the might of the Dutch and Germans. However, Dublin is a venue for matches in the finals tournament and, though host nations don’t qualify for this competition as of right, they do have special entitlements during the draw. Alongside a plethora of rules preventing clashes that raise political sensitivities or involve unfeasibly long distances, there were restrictions on the number of host countries that could be drawn together in each group.

For that reason, to the delight of the Dublin crowd, the Republic was immediately moved to group B, which contained more amenable opponents – Switzerland, Denmark, Georgia and Gibraltar. Meanwhile, Michael O’Neill’s Northern Ireland team was consigned to group C, which features glamorous fixtures, but makes reaching the finals through conventional means exceptionally difficult.

For any of the home nations, the most straightforward route to Euro 2020 is to finish as one of the top 2 teams in its qualifying group. These high-achievers will comprise 20 of the 24 nations at the tournament. The complicating factor is that all of the countries have already played in a separate, but related competition, that took place during 2018.

The UEFA Nations League was intended initially to replace international friendly matches, which were considered a rather unappealing aspect of the football calendar for fans and broadcasters. As an alternative, the organisers created 4 seeded ‘leagues’, each consisting of 4 groups, that included either 3 or 4 teams each.

The format featured promotion and relegation, allowing nations to improve their seeding ahead of the main qualifiers. However, not content with that innovation, UEFA decided that the group winners in each league would compete in a play-off, consisting of semi-finals and a final, with the winners of the divisions filling the final 4 places at Euro 2020.

If your head is now spinning a little, bear with me.

Essentially, the outcome will be that one team from the lowest ranked league, D, whose groups were won by Georgia, Belarus, Kosovo and Macedonia, will take its place at Euro 2020, without the need to best higher rated countries. The same is true for leagues A, B and C. In other words, the strongest 24 teams, as of right, will not reach the finals of the tournament.

To make things even more confusing, the group winners in the top two divisions of the Nations League are generally strong sides, like Portugal and England, who, by the time the play-offs are played, will probably have qualified already, through the conventional route. This means that they are likely to be replaced in these matches by the next best-ranked teams in their division.

In the very likely circumstances that there are not enough countries left in the league to take up the 4 play-off berths, the slots will go to the next best-ranked teams in the division below. For fairness, none of the group winners will be asked to compete in the play-offs for a higher league, so we’re talking here about sides that finished second or third in their Nations League group.

If we clear aside the tangle of detail, this all means that thanks to a fairly arbitrary concertina effect, a number of countries that have performed without distinction in both the conventional qualifiers and the Nations League are likely to get another chance of reaching Euro 2020. Essentially, they’ve simply been in the right place at the right time.

UEFA insists that providing multiple routes to the finals tournament will mean more meaningful matches for more teams; and greater interest from spectators and television companies. In fact, it could well result in poorer quality games, at a competition that has already been butchered by dividing it up between 12 host nations.

Euro 2016 was one of the most engaging international football tournaments in generations. The organisers have taken a popular, successful format and revamped it for little reason other than they can.

Happily though, when the mist clears, we can still be relatively confident that the actual final will be a showpiece occasion, contested between two of the finest teams in the sport. And that match just happens to have been scheduled for Wembley Stadium, London, on the 12th of  July, 2020.