The composition of the participants in the 2024 European Football Championship has been determined

The most exotic participant in the European football championship, which will be held in Germany this summer, was the Georgian national team. Together with the Poles and Ukrainians, the Georgians were among the three teams that secured the last vacant spots in the championship thanks to the play-offs. For the first time in history, they were allowed to get into a top tournament both by a good generation of players that had matured in this decade, and by the selection regulations. He favors teams that are not very highly rated.

The final composition of the next European Championship, which opens on June 14 in Germany, was formed by three Tuesday matches, in each of which a ticket to the tournament was at stake. Before them, 21 of their owners were known. In addition to the host team, these are 20 more teams that succeeded in the main part of the qualification (the Russian team was not allowed to participate in it due to international sanctions), that is, they took either first or second place in their group. A dozen more were given the opportunity to compete for the remaining vacant slots in what the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) officially calls the qualifying play-offs. In fact, we are talking about three mini-tournaments of semi-finals and finals, replacing the traditional play-offs.

All three decisive matches of these tournaments turned out to be extremely tense.

Only one of them was limited to regular time – the one in which the Ukrainians, being inferior in the score, beat the Icelanders 2:1 thanks to a goal in the end by Mikhail Mudryk. There were no goals scored in the other two. The national teams of Poland and Georgia defeated the Welsh and Greeks in penalty kicks.

After that evening, the most sought-after media coverage of the qualifying finish was the spectacular photos from Tbilisi showing a crowd of hundreds of fans who, mad with joy, rushed onto the field of the Boris Paichadze Stadium after the Georgians defeated the Greek team in the penalty shootout marks. The reason for such attention to this event was quite understandable.

There is really nothing particularly remarkable about the national teams of Poland and Ukraine getting to the European Championships.

They haven’t missed continental championships for a long time: the Poles since 2008, the Ukrainians since 2012. These two teams can hardly be considered full-fledged members of the world football elite, but still, in all key parameters – background, selection of players – they are not so far from it.

The Georgian national team is a completely different case. Its leader Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and French coach Willy Sagnol had every right to describe what happened in Tbilisi as a “historic achievement”, without fear that their words would be taken as a significant exaggeration of its significance. Formally, yes, historical. The country’s national team, which, as is known, loves football, is counting its independent existence, and has never entered the top competitions until now. Moreover, I was truly close to penetration only once. Before the previous European Championship, which was moved from 2020 to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Georgians also found themselves in the qualifying playoffs and also reached the decisive match. However, they were defeated by the North Macedonian team.

Those who are trying to explain why the top tournament has now grown together, of course, pay attention to the fact that Georgian football has matured a good generation of young players, in their 20s.

This includes goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili from the Spanish Valencia, who played well against the Greeks, and midfielder Zuriko Davitashvili with forward Georges Mikautadze, who play in the French Championship for Bordeaux and Metz, and, of course, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. The previous season at Napoli turned the former Rubin player into a full-fledged superstar. In the final season, it, like the Neapolitan club as a whole, turned a little sour, but still, judging by the news in the press, it retained the highest level of demand in the leading leagues.

And yet this is hardly a decisive factor. No matter how interesting the core of the Georgian team may look, it still does not look like a reliable guarantee of serious breakthroughs. Transfermarkt has compiled its own hierarchy of European Championship participants based on the value of their bids so far. The Georgians were in 19th place, ahead of the teams of Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. But we must take into account that more than half of their total cost of €150 million (for the Englishmen at the top of the ranking it is ten times more) is the cost of Kvaratskhelia individually, who is estimated at €80 million. Without him, the Georgian team would be much below the closing Romanian classification.

There is no escape from the fact that the Georgian breakthrough is largely a consequence of the whims of UEFA.

He greatly helped teams with a modest track record and modest opportunities to show themselves to the general public in the middle of the last decade, under the former president Michel Platini, when he increased the number of teams in the final part of his main tournament by one third – from 16 to 24, making it easier to qualify for it . Platini’s replacement, Aleksandr Čeferin, went a little further, introducing a qualifying play-off with its unusual format.

If the road to it lay, as before, through the main layer of qualification, the Georgian team would have long forgotten about the dream of a historical achievement.

In her group, she finished not even third, but fourth – behind the Spaniards, Scots and Norwegians, leaving behind only the Cypriots. But the format that has appeared in the current decade suggests that they penetrate into the playoffs not through this layer, but based on the results of performance in the League of Nations, divided into niches. And it doesn’t matter which of them the team is in, the indicators still have equal value. And the Georgian team played precisely in the outsider niche, outperforming the Bulgarians, Macedonians and Gibraltarians in the quartet.

And in the qualifying playoffs, if there are no obstacles to this, teams representing the same niche are brought together. In other words, mediocrely ranked teams have little chance of facing powerful opponents. In the semi-finals, the Georgians had to deal with the Luxembourgers representing the dwarf state, whom they beat – 2:0 – not without difficulty, and in the final – with the Greek team, seemingly a well-known brand, but a brand experiencing an acute crisis. The Greeks have not entered the most important competitions for ten years, since the 2014 World Cup, and three quarters of their roster are little-known players. So, strictly speaking, no magic. Especially if you remember that the very first use of the experiment with linking qualifications to the League of Nations made it possible for two teams to make their debut at the European Championship three years ago: Finland and North Macedonia.

Moreover, it seems there won’t be a miracle, even if the Georgian national team gets to make some noise at the European Championships. A total of 16 teams advance to the playoffs of the championship – guaranteed from first or second place in the group, plus four of those that ended up in third. The quartet, in which the Georgians were included, clearly does not resemble a “quartet of death”. There is an obvious favorite here – the Portuguese, and along with them – the unstable Czechs and Turks.

In this sense, the Ukrainians were a little luckier than the Georgians (in their group with the monster – the Belgian national team – the “inexpensive”, according to Transfermarkt, are the Romanians and Slovaks), and the Poles, despite their reputation as a strong team, which for some reason constantly folds with a jerk – much less. In the Polish quartet, in company with the undisputed football giants – the French – giants with reservations are the Dutch, as well as quite promising, if you look at human resources, the Austrians.

Alexey Dospehov