Two issues of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying play-offs

ABSTRACT

The play-offs of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying tournament determine the last four participants in the UEFA European Championship 2020. Sixteen teams, which have failed to obtain a slot in the qualifying group stage, will be selected and divided into four paths of four teams each based on the inaugural season 2018–19 of the UEFA Nations League. We provide a critical examination of the relevant UEFA regulation and show that its articles contradict each other and allow for an unfair formation of the play-off paths: it might happen that all conditions cannot be satisfied simultaneously and a group winner might face stronger opponents than a non-group winner from the same league despite its better performance in the UEFA Nations League. Simple and straightforward solutions for both problems are suggested.

KEYWORDS:

• Consistency
• fairness
• mechanism design
• sports rules
• UEFA Euro

Acknowledgments

Four anonymous reviewers, Dezsö Bednay, and Tamás Halm have provided valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. We are indebted to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_communityWikipedia community for contributing to our research by collecting and structuring useful information on the sports tournament discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.’ Source: https://quotes.yourdictionary.com/author/quote/539979. Downloaded 26 March 2019.

2. On 17 March 2020, UEFA has announced that the tournament would be delayed by a year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The play-off matches have been postponed until further notice on 1 April 2020. Nonetheless, we will refer to this event as UEFA Euro 2020.

3. See the post of the user ‘Forza AZ’ on 10 October 2017, 23:41 at https://kassiesa.net/uefa/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=5 t = 3463 start = 150. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for the remark.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Research Program grant PPD2019-9/2019.