2023 UEFA European Under-21 Championship qualification

The 2023 UEFA European Under-21 Championship qualifying competition was a men's under-21 football competition to determine the 14 teams that would be joining the automatically qualified co-hosts Romania and Georgia in the 2023 UEFA European Under-21 Championship final tournament.

Apart from Romania and Georgia, all remaining 53 UEFA member national teams entered the qualifying competition. Players born on or after 1 January 2000 were eligible to participate.

Format

The qualifying competition consisted of the following two rounds:

Qualifying group stage: The 53 teams were drawn into nine groups: eight groups of six teams and one group of five teams. Each group was played in home-and-away round-robin format. The nine group winners and the best runner-up (not counting results against the sixth-placed team) qualified directly for the final tournament, while the remaining eight runners-up advanced to the play-offs.
Play-offs: The eight teams were drawn into four ties to play home-and-away two-legged matches to determine the last four qualified teams.

Tiebreakers

In the qualifying group stage, teams were 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 were applied, in the order given, to determine the rankings (Regulations Article 14.01):

Points in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
Goal difference in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
Goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
Away goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
If more than two teams were tied, and after applying all head-to-head criteria above, a subset of teams were still tied, all head-to-head criteria above were 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 best runner-up from the qualifying group stage, the results against the teams in sixth place were discarded. The following criteria were applied (Regulations Article 15.02):

Points;
Goal difference;
Goals scored;
Away goals scored;
Wins;
Away wins;
Disciplinary points;
UEFA coefficient ranking for the qualifying group stage draw.

Schedule

Qualifying group stage

Draw

Each group contained one team from each of Pots AÃ¢ÂÂF (Pots AÃ¢ÂÂE for a five-team group). Based on the decisions taken by the UEFA Emergency Panel, six pairs of teams would not be drawn in the same group.

Armenia and Azerbaijan
Gibraltar and Spain
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo
Kosovo and Serbia
Kosovo and Russia
Russia and Ukraine

Groups

Group A

Group B

Group C

On 28 February 2022, FIFA and UEFA announced that Russia was suspended from all competitions. On 2 May 2022, UEFA announced that Russia would no longer be allowed to take part in the competition, that their previous results were nullified, and that Group C would continue with five teams.

Group D

Group E

Group F

Group G

Group H

Group I

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 were taken into account, while results against the sixth-placed team in six-team groups were not included. As a result, eight matches played by each second-placed team were counted for the purposes of determining the ranking. The top-ranked team qualified directly for the final tournament, while the other teams entered the play-offs.