The UEFA Women's Euro 2022 qualifying competition was a women's football competition that determined the 15 teams joining the automatically qualified hosts England in the UEFA Women's Euro 2022 final tournament.
Apart from England, 47 of the remaining 54 UEFA member national teams entered the qualifying competition, including Cyprus who entered for the first time at senior women's level, and Kosovo who entered their first Women's Euro.
Different from previous qualifying competitions, the preliminary round was abolished and all entrants started from the qualifying group stage. The qualifying competition consisted of two rounds:
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):
To determine the three best runners-up from the qualifying group stage, the results against the teams in sixth place were discarded. The following criteria were applied (Regulations Article 14.02):
In the play-offs, the team that scored more goals on aggregate over the two legs qualified for the final tournament. If the aggregate score was level, the away goals rule was applied, i.e., the team that scored more goals away from home over the two legs advanced. If away goals were also equal, extra time was played. The away goals rule was again applied after extra time, i.e., if there were goals scored during extra time and the aggregate score was still level, the visiting team advancesd by virtue of more away goals scored. If no goals were scored during extra time, the tie was decided by penalty shoot-out (Regulations Article 19.01).
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, the UEFA Executive Committee approved on 28 August 2020 the following principles for the qualifying phase of UEFA Women's Euro 2022:
On 24 September 2020, UEFA announced that five substitutions would be permitted for the remainder of the Women's Euro 2022 qualifying competition, with a sixth allowed in extra time during the play-offs. However, each team is only given three opportunities to make substitutions during matches, with a fourth opportunity in extra time, excluding substitutions made at half-time, before the start of extra time and at half-time in extra time.
The qualifying matches are played on dates that fall within the FIFA Women's International Match Calendar. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the final tournament was postponed from the summer of 2021 to 2022, and the qualifying round and play-offs were also postponed.
The draw for the qualifying group stage was held on 21 February 2019, 13:30 CET (), at the UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland.
The teams were seeded according to their coefficient ranking, calculated based on the following:
Each group contained one team from each of Pots 1âÂÂ5 (two teams from Pot 5 for six-team group). Based on the decisions taken by the UEFA Emergency Panel, Kosovo would not be drawn in the same group as Bosnia and Herzegovina or Serbia.
As groups A and B had six teams while the others had five, in order to determine the three best second-placed teams from the qualifying group stage which advance directly to the final tournament, only the results of the second-placed teams against the first, third, fourth and fifth-placed teams in their group are taken into account. As a result, eight matches played by each second-placed team are counted for the purposes of determining the ranking.
The following 16 teams qualified for the final tournament.