The 2027 UEFA European Under-21 Championship qualifying competition is a men's under-21 football competition to determine the 14 teams that would be joining the automatically qualified co-hosts Albania and Serbia in the 2027 UEFA European Under-21 Championship final tournament.
51 UEFA member national teams will enter the qualifying competition. Players born on or after 1 January 2004 are eligible to participate.
Two teams are not taking part in this tournament: Russia was suspended on 28 February 2022 by FIFA and UEFA from all competitions due to its invasion of Ukraine,[1][2] while the Liechtenstein team has been temporarily dissolved based on a decision announced on 5 October 2022.[3]
Format
The qualifying competition consisted of the following two rounds:
Qualifying group stage: The 51 teams were drawn into nine groups: six groups of six teams and three groups of five teams. Each group will be 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) will qualify directly for the final tournament, while the remaining eight runners-up advanced to the play-offs.
Play-offs: The eight teams will be 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):[4]
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 total based only on yellow and red cards received by players and team officials in all group matches (red card = 3 points, yellow card = 1 point, expulsion for two yellow cards in one match = 3 points);
Position in the UEFA men's Under-21 national team coefficient rankings used 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 are discarded. The following criteria are applied (Regulations Article 15.02):[4]
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 A–F (Pots A–E for a five-team group). Based on the previous decisions taken by the UEFA Executive Committee and the UEFA Emergency Panel, four pairs of teams were not drawn in the same group.
Updated to match(es) played on 18 November 2025. Source: UEFA
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-ranked team will qualify directly for the final tournament, while the other teams enter the play-offs.
Divin Mubama
Albania
Serbia
