UEFA EURO 2024 qualifying draw procedure approved

The UEFA Executive Committee today met in Hvar, Croatia and approved the procedure for the upcoming UEFA EURO 2024 qualifying draw, which will take place in Frankfurt on 9 October at 12:00 CET.

The qualifying draw procedure can be summarised as follows:

• Germany, the UEFA EURO 2024 host association team, qualifies automatically for the final tournament and is therefore not taking part in the qualifying draw.

• All Russian teams are currently suspended following the decision of the UEFA Executive Committee of 28 February 2022, which was further confirmed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport on 15 July 2022. Russia is therefore not included in the UEFA European Football Championship 2022-24 qualifying draw.

The UEFA EURO 2024 qualifying draw is scheduled for Sunday 9 October 2022 at the Festhalle exhibition centre in Frankfurt.Messe Frankfurt / Pietro Sutera

• 53 national associations will participate in the qualifying draw, which will allocate the participants to ten groups – seven groups of five teams and three groups of six teams.

• The ten group-winners and the ten group runners-up qualify for the final tournament. The remaining three places will be decided via the play-offs to be played in March 2024.

• The 53 participating teams are seeded according to the overall 2022/23 UEFA Nations League rankings and divided into seven pots.

2022/23 U-19 Futsal Championship

Poreč, Croatia, was appointed as the host venue for the final tournament of the 2022/23 Under-19 Futsal EURO.

Football in Schools festival

Earlier in the day, the Executive Committee attended a Football in Schools grassroots festival, which saw more than 80 girls and boys play on mini-pitches alongside football legends and the UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin.

Launched in 2020, the Football in Schools initiative aims to see more than 2.8 million children and over 81,000 schools taking part by 2024. After two years of the programme, around 2.4 million children from 44,000 schools are already participating. Equally as impressively, over 100,000 schoolteachers have already been educated to deliver footballing training sessions, which easily exceeds the initial target of 63,000.

Over the four-year period, around €24 million is being invested in developing and promoting life skills such as fair play, respect, teamwork, and leadership through the playing of football at school.