by Jonathan Greengrass

Created on: July 19, 2011   Last Updated: July 22, 2011

The UEFA European Championship is a soccer tournament contested every four years by 16 national teams who have made it through the qualifying phase. The tournament makes its next stop in 2012, hosted jointly by Poland and Ukraine. Qualification occurs in the two years prior to the tournament. The qualification system is based on groups. The members of UEFA who wish to enter (of which there were 51 for Euro 2012) are allocated a seeding based on the UEFA national team coefficient, a ranking system which uses a number of statistics to rank the national teams. The current holder of the European Championship is automatically allocated the number one seed. The host nation(s) are automatically entered into the final tournament, so the teams are competing for the remaining spaces. 

The groups are drawn at the end of the World Cup qualification stage, over two years before the European Championships take place. The process depends on the number of teams that have entered, as well as the number of host nations. For the current European Championships, the draw was divided into nine groups, six containing six sides and three containing 5. This meant that each group contained one team each from the top five seed groups and six contained a team from the sixth seed group. 

Once drawn into groups, the teams contest both a home and away fixture with each other team in their group. This means teams in the six groups with six teams contest ten matches, five home and five away, while teams in the other three groups contest eight matches each, four home and four away. Teams earn points in a standard league format (three for a win, one for a draw) and the team with the most points at the end of qualification wins its group. If two teams are tied on points at the end of qualification, the head to head record the teams is taken into account, with the team with the better record prevailing. If the teams cannot be split head to head, goal difference over the whole group is taken into account, then goals scored, then goals scored away from home. If teams are still tied after these criteria, the UEFA Fair Play ranking of each team is taken into account. In the incredibly unlikely event that teams are still equal after this, lots are drawn to determine the higher ranked team.

The nine group winners at the end of qualification automatically earn entry into the final tournament. They are joined by the best runner up, the team which has the best record against the top five sides in its group (in order to preserve  fairness for teams in the three smaller groups). The remaining eight second placed teams are randomly drawn into pairs, and then go on to play two legs, home and away, with the winner in each leg joining the ten group winners, two co-hosts and the best runners up in the final sixteen that makes up the tournament.

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