Spotlight on EURO 2004™ draw

The EURO 2004™ qualification draw takes place in Porto at 12.00CET on Friday and uefa.com will be there to record the event with exclusive video, audio and text commentary.

Fifty countries in the hat
Fifty of the 51 UEFA member associations will be included in the draw, with Portugal qualifying automatically for the final round as EURO 2004™ hosts. Under the procedure, the EURO 2004™ qualifying competition will be staged in ten groups of five teams each.

Key dates
The qualifiers run from September 2002 to October 2003. The EURO 2004™ final round, which takes place in Portugal between 12 June and 4 July 2004, will feature 16 teams – hosts Portugal, the ten group winners and the five winners of play-offs between the ten group runners-up.

France top seeds
Current European champions France are automatically the top seeds, while the other associations taking part in the qualifying competition have been classified on the basis of their results in the qualifying competitions for EURO 2000™ and the 2002 FIFA World Cup.

Draw procedure
Starting with pot E and ending with pot A, the competing teams will be divided into Groups 1 to 10 in the order in which they are drawn. The ten teams in pot E will be the first drawn into the ten groups, the ten teams in pot D will be the next allocated a group, and so forth.

Pot allocation
The countries taking part in the qualifying competition have been allocated to the following pots:
Pot A: France (reigning champions), Sweden, Spain, Czech Republic, Germany, Republic of Ireland, Romania, Italy, Belgium, Turkey
Pot B: Russia, Croatia, Denmark, Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Poland, England, Slovenia, Ukraine, Scotland
Pot C: Austria, Norway, Slovakia, Israel, Switzerland, Iceland, Bulgaria, Finland, Greece, Hungary
Pot D: Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Belarus, Wales, Estonia, Latvia, Northern Ireland, Georgia, FYR Macedonia, Lithuania
Pot E: Armenia, Moldova, Albania, Faroe Islands, Azerbaijan, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Malta, Luxembourg, Andorra