Euro 2020 qualified teams

Euro 2020 is this summer and 20 out of the 24 teams have qualified after the qualifying phase has finished. The teams so far are England, France, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Spain, Czech Republic, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Portugal, Switzerland, Denmark, Wales.

The teams that need to qualify through the play-offs are Scotland, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Iceland, Bosnia &Herzegovina, Norway, Serbia, Bulgaria, Israel, Romania, Georgia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Belarus, Slovakia, and Hungary. They will play their play-off matches in March 2020.

This year will be the format will be different as UEFA are celebrating the 60th birthday of the Euro Cup and therefore they have decided to have 12 host cities across Europe instead of having one or two countries hosting it. The host cities are Amsterdam (Netherlands), Baku (Azerbaijan), Bilbao (Spain), Bucharest (Romania), Budapest (Hungary), Copenhagen (Denmark), Dublin (Republic of Ireland), Glasgow (Scotland), London (England), Munich (Germany), Rome (Italy), Saint Petersburg (Russia). Each qualified team will play at least two matches in their host country. However, if two host countries get paired in the same group such as Spain and Russia then they will have to determine who plays where.

The early favourites to win the trophy are France, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal, but then there are also teams such as Italy who won all of their qualifying matches with only conceding three goals, as well as England and Germany who have strong squads. It will be very interesting to see who gets paired in the groups together. However, since they changed the format of the Euro’s it is quite easy to qualify from the group stage. Four out of the six group’s third-place team will also qualify. In the last edition in 2016, Portugal finished their group third and only won one game in regular time and still went on to win the competition. It makes it easier for some of the smaller nations just sit back and hold on for a draw which makes it a little more boring. However, it gives the opportunity for smaller nations to also get further in the competition as we saw with Iceland and also makes the competition longer with more matches which is something we all want.