2023 UEFA European Under-21 Championship qualification

The 2023 UEFA European Under-21 Championship qualifying competition was a men's under-21 football competition to determine the 14 teams that would be joining the automatically qualified co-hosts Romania and Georgia in the 2023 UEFA European Under-21 Championship final tournament.

Apart from Romania and Georgia, all remaining 53 UEFA member national teams entered the qualifying competition. Players born on or after 1 January 2000 were eligible to participate.

Format
The qualifying competition consisted of the following two rounds:


 * Qualifying group stage: The 53 teams were drawn into nine groups: eight groups of six teams and one group of five teams. Each group was played in home-and-away round-robin format. The nine group winners and the best runner-up (not counting results against the sixth-placed team) qualified directly for the final tournament, while the remaining eight runners-up advanced to the play-offs.
 * Play-offs: The eight teams were drawn into four ties to play home-and-away two-legged matches to determine the last four qualified teams.

Tiebreakers
In the qualifying group stage, teams were ranked according to points (3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 points for a loss), and if tied on points, the following tiebreaking criteria were applied, in the order given, to determine the rankings (Regulations Article 14.01):
 * 1) Points in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
 * 2) Goal difference in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
 * 3) Goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
 * 4) Away goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
 * 5) If more than two teams were tied, and after applying all head-to-head criteria above, a subset of teams were still tied, all head-to-head criteria above were reapplied exclusively to this subset of teams;
 * 6) Goal difference in all group matches;
 * 7) Goals scored in all group matches;
 * 8) Away goals scored in all group matches;
 * 9) Wins in all group matches;
 * 10) Away wins in all group matches;
 * 11) Disciplinary points (red card = 3 points, yellow card = 1 point, expulsion for two yellow cards in one match = 3 points);
 * 12) UEFA coefficient ranking for the qualifying group stage draw.

To determine the best runner-up from the qualifying group stage, the results against the teams in sixth place were discarded. The following criteria were applied (Regulations Article 15.02):
 * 1) Points;
 * 2) Goal difference;
 * 3) Goals scored;
 * 4) Away goals scored;
 * 5) Wins;
 * 6) Away wins;
 * 7) Disciplinary points;
 * 8) UEFA coefficient ranking for the qualifying group stage draw.

Draw
Each group contained one team from each of Pots A–F (Pots A–E for a five-team group). Based on the decisions taken by the UEFA Emergency Panel, six pairs of teams would not be drawn in the same group.


 * Armenia and Azerbaijan
 * Gibraltar and Spain
 * Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo
 * Kosovo and Serbia
 * Kosovo and Russia
 * Russia and Ukraine

Group C
On 28 February 2022, FIFA and UEFA announced that Russia was suspended from all competitions. On 2 May 2022, UEFA announced that Russia would no longer be allowed to take part in the competition, that their previous results were nullified, and that Group C would continue with five teams.

Ranking of second-placed teams
Only the results of the second-placed teams against the first, third, fourth and fifth-placed teams in their group were taken into account, while results against the sixth-placed team in six-team groups were not included. As a result, eight matches played by each second-placed team were counted for the purposes of determining the ranking. The top-ranked team qualified directly for the final tournament, while the other teams entered the play-offs.

Play-offs
The draw for the play-offs was held on 21 June 2022 in Nyon, Switzerland.


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Qualified teams
The following teams qualified for the final tournament.

Note: All appearance statistics include only U-21 era (since 1978).