The draw for the first-ever UEFA National League has been completed (in Lausanne, Switzerland) and the new tournament should produce some exciting fixtures as well, such as the Republic of Ireland and Wales coming together, while the Netherlands, France and Germany have been piled into one group and England get to challenge Spain and Croatia in theirs. This is all for the new league system created by UEFA, with promotion and relegation at stake as well. On top of that, the UEFA Nations League offers, an albeit complicated, back door passage for four teams to get to the European Championships.
What is the UEFA Nations League?
UEFA came up with a plan to fill in the void in those years that don’t have a European Championships or a World Cup. The plan was to get a lot more competitive action going between the European nations to try and improve the standard of the game across the continent, as well as to eliminate some of the meaningless friendly matches that is generally a plague on the international scene.
How did the draw work?
Each of the 55 UEFA nations were split across four Leagues based on their current rankings. The top twelve ranked sides in Europe went to League A, those ranked 13-24 went to League B, then the next fifteen went to League C and the final sixteen went into League D.
Each of the Leagues has four groups within them consisting of either three or four teams and this is where relegation/promotion works. A team getting relegated from League A Group 2 drops to League B Group 2, while, for example, the winner of Group 3 in League D goes up to the Group 3 in League C. So the teams can only move up and down through the Leagues in their designated Group number.
What this will do is allow the lower ranked teams to potentially make their way up the Leagues to face higher ranked side and therefore have more of a chance of playing competitive action against better sides. Each team will play the other teams in their group twice (home and away) for a season of the UEFA Nations League.
Draw Outcome & Betting Odds
League A (plus Bet365 group winner odds)
Group One Netherlands 8/1, France 6/5, Germany 10/11
Group Two: Iceland 8/1, Switzerland 11/4, Belgium 2/5
Group Three: Poland 10/3, Italy 11/10, Portugal 6/4
Group Four: Croatia 9/2, England 9/4, Spain 4/6
League B
Group One: Czech Republic 2/1, Ukraine 13/8, Slovakia 13/8
Group Two: Turkey 9/4, Sweden 8/5, Russia 6/4
Group Three: Northern Ireland 10/3, Bosnia and Herzegovina 5/4, Austria 11/8
Group Four: Denmark 10/11, Republic of Ireland 5/2, Wales 5/2
League C
Group One: Israel 15/8, Albania 7/4, Scotland 13/8
Group Two: Estonia 9/1, Finland 11/2, Greece 6/5, Hungary 13/8
Group Three: Cyprus 13/2, Bulgaria 2/1, Norway 2/1, Slovenia 9/4
Group Four: Lithuania 16/1, Montenegro 11/4, Serbia 5/4, Romania 2/1
League D
Group One: Andorra 40/1, Kazakhstan 3/1, Latvia 4/1, Georgia 4/7
Group Two: San Marino 100/1, Moldova 4/1, Luxembourg 10/3, Belarus 1/2
Group Three: Kosovo 11/8, Malta 10/1, Faroe Islands 11/2, Azerbaijan 5/4
Group Four: Gibraltar 66/1, Liechtenstein 33/1, Armenia 11/8, Macedonia 4/7* (all betting odds above taken from January 24th at 11:32 p.m.)
When will the games be played?
In a period between September and November 2018 (a ten week period in total) all of the matches in this season’s UEFA Nations League will take place. A team finishing top of a group will get promoted, anyone finishing bottom of a group will go down a tier. The exception to this is the winner of the League A groups. All four of those will move through a Nations League knockout stage in the following year to decide the winner.
What about Euro Qualifying
This is where things get a little confusing. Qualifying for Euro 2020 will see the 55 nations split over ten groups and the top two automatically go through to the finals. So that has been made a little simpler. All qualifiers for Euro 2020 will happen between March and November 2019. The seeding for the European Championships will be based on performances in the Nations League.
Seeing two qualifiers progress from each of the ten groups only adds up to twenty nations and that leaves four Euro 2020 places open and this is where the UEFA Nations League comes back into play. Each of the four tiers in the Nations League will produce four group winners. Those sixteen teams will be the ones to go through to a play-off to compete for the final four places at Euro 2020.
However, if a group winner has already qualified for Euro 2020 through normal qualification, then their place in the play offs will go to the next highest-ranked team from their Nations League tier. So for example, if Northern Ireland won Group Three in League B of the Nations League, but also went and directly qualified for Euro 2020, they don’t go to the Euro 2020 qualification play offs, the next highest ranked team from their tier will go to the play-offs instead. So performance in the Nations League can have extra importance. Basically it will boil down to one team from each of the four UEFA Nations League getting a place at Euro 2016 from the play-offs as each of the Leagues will have their own path through the Euro 2020 qualification play offs. So this system gives lower-ranked sides a chance to play on the big stage where they would usually find normal qualification too hard to pull off.
UEFA Nations League Odds Outright Winner Odds
Spain 7/2, Germany 4/1, Belgium 11/2, France 5/1, Italy 9/1, England 12/1, Portugal 14/1, Croatia 20/1, Switzerland 33/1, Poland 40/1, Netherlands 50/1, bar 80/1
Predictions
There is a lot of actual competitive international football coming along on the horizon and that has to be a good thing for the game. In terms of an overall winner of the Nations League then you’re still going to be looking at the big guns. Spain looks the most obvious choice out of the lot because of the draw and that’s because they have an easier group ahead of them. It’s easier to predict them winning their group and getting to the knockouts than it is for either France and Germany who are lumped together. The ones who could impress too are Belgium who should win their group and get to the knockouts. It’s all up in the air until we see how seriously everyone takes this, but Spain and Belgium (7/2 and 11/2 respectively at bet365) aren’t bad places to start *betting odds taken January 25th, 2018 at 01:04 a.m.)
