The 2025 UEFA European Under-21 Championship qualifying competition is a men's under-21 football competition to determine the 15 teams that will be joining the automatically qualified host Slovakia in the 2025 UEFA European Under-21 Championship final tournament.
Apart from Slovakia (already qualified as hosts of the tournament), Liechtenstein (dissolved U21 team until 2025) and Russia (banned due to the invasion of Ukraine), all remaining 52 UEFA member national teams enter the qualifying competition. Players born on or after 1 January 2002 are eligible to participate.
Format
The qualifying competition will consist of the following two rounds:
Qualifying group stage: The 52 teams are drawn into nine groups: seven groups of six teams and two groups of five teams. Each group is played in home-and-away round-robin format. The nine group winners and the three best runner-up (not counting results against the sixth-placed team) qualify directly for the final tournament, while the remaining six runners-up advance to the play-offs.
Play-offs: The six teams are drawn into three ties to play home-and-away two-legged matches to determine the last three qualified teams.
Tiebreakers
In the qualifying group stage, teams are ranked according to points (3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 points for a loss), and if tied on points, the following tiebreaking criteria are applied, in the order given, to determine the rankings (Regulations Article 14.01):[1]
Goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
If more than two teams are tied, and after applying all head-to-head criteria above, a subset of teams are still tied, all head-to-head criteria above are reapplied exclusively to this subset of teams;
Goal difference in all group matches;
Goals scored in all group matches;
Away goals scored in all group matches;
Wins in all group matches;
Away wins in all group matches;
Disciplinary points (red card = 3 points, yellow card = 1 point, expulsion for two yellow cards in one match = 3 points);
UEFA coefficient ranking for the qualifying group stage draw.
To determine the bests runner-up from the qualifying group stage, the results against the teams in sixth place are discarded. The following criteria are applied (Regulations Article 15.02):[1]
Points;
Goal difference;
Goals scored;
Away goals scored;
Wins;
Away wins;
Disciplinary points;
UEFA coefficient ranking for the qualifying group stage draw.
Each group contained one team from each of Pots 1–6 (Pots 1–5 for five-team group). Based on the decisions taken by the UEFA Emergency Panel, the following teams would not be drawn in the same group.
Updated to match(es) played on 20 November 2023. Source: UEFA Notes:
^ abRanked on head-to-head points: Denmark 4, Wales 1.
Ranking of second-placed teams
Only the results of the second-placed teams against the first, third, fourth and fifth-placed teams in their group are taken into account, while results against the sixth-placed team in six-team groups are not included. As a result, eight matches played by each second-placed team are counted for the purposes of determining the ranking. The top three teams qualify directly for the final tournament, while the other teams enter the play-offs.
Youssoufa Moukoko
