The 2015 edition will be the last U21 tournament before the competition reverts to even numbered years the following summer.
UEFA moved the tournament to odd years starting from 2007 "to allow it to step out of the shadow of the UEFA European Football Championship and the FIFA World Cup.". It seems being in the shadow is just fine :)
UEFA might use the same system used for the 2007 Under-21 qualification.
A preliminary round to trim the field to 42 teams, followed by 14 three-team groups, with the winners playing-off for the seven spots.
The bottom 20 teams would be involved in the preliminary (assuming none of them are chosen as hosts).
The group stage draw will have one pot with the top 14 teams, one pot with the next 14 and one last pot with 4 teams and the 10 winners of the preliminary round.
The 2016 hosts were not chosen yet. I think the bidding hasn't even started, that's why I've listed all UEFA members in the table below and that's why the third pot has 5 teams, not 4.
Rank - Team - Coefficient
1 Spain 37336 2 Czech Republic 34824 3 Netherlands 32702 4 England 32502 5 Germany 32392 6 Switzerland 31766 7 France 31743 8 Italy 30936 9 Israel 30627 10 Sweden 30296 11 Russia 30135 12 Romania 29654 13 Serbia 28693 14 Denmark 28547 ---------------------------- 15 Portugal 28377 16 Turkey 28118 17 Ukraine 27881 18 Scotland 27310 19 Armenia 27068 20 Bosnia-Herzegovina 27019 21 Slovakia 26968 22 Slovenia 26818 23 Belgium 25564 24 Belarus 25563 25 Hungary 25501 26 Greece 25385 27 Austria 25169 28 Wales 25064 ---------------------------- 29 Montenegro 24793 30 Norway 24501 31 Republic of Ireland 23310 32 Georgia 22968 33 Poland 22877 ---------------------------- 34 Finland 22185 35 Croatia 21576 36 Bulgaria 21460 37 FYR Macedonia 20585 38 Cyprus 20264 39 Moldova 19851 40 Iceland 19434 41 Lithuania 17617 42 Azerbaijan 16772 43 Northern Ireland 15834 44 Faroe Islands 15409 45 Albania 15356 46 Latvia 15184 47 Kazakhstan 14709 48 Estonia 14009 49 Malta 12563 50 Luxembourg 10334 51 Andorra 8717 52 San Marino 8538 53 Liechtenstein 8167
Urgh, what's the point, it will just oversaturate the summer now. Before we got a tournament every year. The quality of the tournament will also be diluted as the best talent at U21 level will be with the senior teams. This will be especially bad in Euro years with 24 teams, the entire field will probably be stripped in this way.
ReplyDeleteStupid, stupid move. They should also expand the tournament to 16 teams, 8 is too harsh, especially with the qualifying format.
Does anyone know why these idiots have done this?
In order "to align the qualifying phase of the competition with that of the national A teams".
DeleteSee UEFA.com.
I believe this has to do with the Olympic tournament. The UEFA under-21 championship is used to select the four European teams representing UEFA at the Olympics (an under-23 tournament). With the old system the teams were known more than a year in advance and the four qualified federations had to juggle two teams: the one going to the Olympics and the one participating in the next under-21 championship.
ReplyDelete