When is Euro 2020 qualification? Draw, seeding & all you need to know

The long road to Euro 2020 begins next year, but first the teams need to find out which qualification groups they will be in

International football in Europe has been complicated somewhat by the inception of the Nations League, but the top prize in the continent remains the European Championship.

Euro 2020, the 16th edition of the UEFA competition, is being styled as a celebration, with games being held across Europe to mark the 60th birthday of the first ever tournament.

UEFA's 55 member associations will be desperate to take their place on the stage for such a historic venture, but there is only room for an exclusive group to compete at the finals.

The qualification stage is set to get under way in 2019 and the groups will soon be known, with the draw set to take place at the end of 2018.

We all love the drama of the draw, but it helps to understand how it works so that you have a better picture of who your team could get.

So with the draw date edging closer, Goal brings you everything you need to know.

When is the Euro 2020 qualifying draw?

The draw for Euro 2020 qualifying is scheduled to take place on December 2, 2018.

It will be held in Ireland at the Convention Centre Dublin and proceedings will get started at 11am GMT (6am ET).

The Nations League finals draw will be held a day later, on December 3, and it will also take place in Dublin.

Euro 2020 qualifying draw seeding & how it works

*Ensured at least a play-off place after winning UEFA Nations League groups.

There are seven seeding pots for the draw, with the four Nations League finalists - Switzerland, Portugal, Netherlands and England - populating one pot. They will be drawn into groups A to D in order to ensure they have two dates available for contesting the Nations League finals in June 2019.

Teams from Pot 1 will be drawn into groups E to J, while the teams from Pots 2, 3, 4 and 5 (each made up of 10 teams) will be drawn into the 10 qualifying groups.

The five teams in Pot 6 will be drawn into the six-team groups F to J.

Draw restrictions

To make matters more complicated there are some restrictions in place for the draw prohibiting certain teams from facing each other.

The UEFA Executive Committee has decreed that the following teams cannot face each other:

Gibraltar and Spain

Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo

Kosovo and Serbia

If those pairings do occur then the team drawn is placed in the first available alphabetical group instead.

Winter venue restrictions are also in place for countries deemed to have a "high or medium risk" of severe weather conditions. In order to minimise the risk of games being adversely affected groups can only contain two of the following 10 teams:

Belarus/ Estonia/ Faroe Islands/ Finland/ Iceland/ Latvia/ Lithuania/ Norway/ Russia/ Ukraine.

Three countries marked with an asterisk - Faroe Islands, Iceland and Finland - are deemed to be 'hard winter venues' and cannot host games in March or November. If a third team on the above list happens to be drawn into a group already containing two such teams, they will go into the next highest alphabetical group instead.

Furthermore, there are restrictions in place to avoid excessive travel, so only one pair of the following teams can populate a group:

From/to Kazakhstan (Astana)

Andorra (Barcelona)/ England (London)/ France (Paris)/ Iceland (Reykjavik)/ Malta (Valletta)/ Northern Ireland (Belfast)/ Portugal (Lisbon)/ Republic of Ireland (Dublin)/ Scotland (Edinburgh)/ Spain (Madrid)/ Wales (Cardiff)

From/to Azerbaijan (Baku)

Iceland (Reykjavik)/ Portugal (Lisbon)

From/to Iceland (Reykjavik)

Armenia (Yerevan)/ Cyprus (Larnaca)/ Georgia (Tbilisi)/ Israel (Tel-Aviv)

How to watch the Euro 2020 qualifying draw

UEFA's official website will be streaming the draw live and it will also be available to watch on TV.

We will be bringing you all the latest developments from the draw too, so be sure to check in here.

When does Euro 2020 qualifying start?

Once the draw is made and the teams know who they will be facing they have roughly three months to prepare for their first games.

The qualifying cycle is scheduled to begin on March 21-23, 2019 and group games will be played in June, September, October and November.

The Euro 2020 play-off draw will be held on November 22 at the conclusion of the groups, with the play-offs themselves being played in March 2019.

How many teams qualify for Euro 2020?

Euro 2020 will see 24 teams compete for the right to be crowned the best team in Europe.

There will be 10 qualifying groups: five groups of five teams (A-E) and five groups of six (F-J). The top two teams in each group will qualify automatically for the European Championship.

The remaining four places at the tournament will be decided via play-offs, with 16 teams already guaranteed a place in that stage through their performance in the Nations League.

Those 16 teams are the winners of each Nations League group, but they may potentially qualify directly through their qualification group, in which case the next best ranked team of their Nations League section is allocated the play-off place.

None of the host nations will qualify automatically but, in order to give them a better chance of qualifying, a maximum of two host nations can be drawn in the same group.

When & where will Euro 2020 take place?

The 16th edition of the European Championship will kick off on June 12, 2020 and it will conclude on July 12, 2020.

It will be held across 12 different cities in Europe, with UEFA celebrating the 60th birthday of the first European Championship (then called the European Nations Cup), which was held in France in 1960.

The final and semi-finals will be contested in London at Wembley Stadium.

Euro 2020 host cities