The 2026 UEFA European Under-17 Championship qualification is an under-17 men's national football team competition that will determine the seven teams joining the automatically qualified hosts Estonia in the 2026 UEFA European Under-17 Championship final tournament.[1]
Russia were excluded from the tournament due to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Therefore, including hosts Estonia, 54 teams entered this qualification competition. The Round 1 of the qualification was played from 1 October to 18 November 2025, while the Round 2 will be played in spring 2026. Players born on or after 1 January 2009 are eligible to participate.
Format
The qualification consists of two rounds; both of them consist of several groups, which are played as single-round-robin mini-tournaments, with one team from each group selected as the host after the draw.
Round 1: 54 teams were drawn into 14 groups of three or four. The top two teams from each group advanced to Round 2 League A; the other teams advanced to Round 2 League B.
Round 2:
League A: 28 teams will be drawn into seven groups of four. The group winners will qualify for the final tournament. If Estonia, as the host of the final tournament, wins one of these groups, the best runner-up team will also qualify. Teams that will finish fourth will be relegated to Round 1 League B for the next season.
League B: 26 teams will be drawn into seven groups of three or four. The group winners will be promoted to Round 1 League A for the next season.
Tiebreakers
In a group, teams are 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 Articles 14.01 and 14.02):[2]
Goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
If more than two teams are tied, and after applying all head-to-head criteria above, a subset of teams are still tied, all head-to-head criteria above are reapplied exclusively to this subset of teams;
Goal difference in all group matches;
Goals scored in all group matches;
Penalty shoot-out if only two teams had the same number of points, and they met in the last round of the group and were tied after applying all criteria above (not used if more than two teams had the same number of points, or if their rankings were not relevant for qualification for the next stage);
Disciplinary points (red card = 3 points, yellow card = 1 point, expulsion for two yellow cards in one match = 3 points);
for teams in Round 2, position in the Round 1 overall rankings.
Round 1
Draw
The draw for the Round 1 was held on 5 December 2024 at the UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland.[3]
The teams were seeded according to their results in Round 1 of the 2024–25 qualification.[4] The matches of the first-, the second- and the third-placed teams against the fourth-placed teams in their group did not count towards this ranking. To determine this ranking, the following criteria were followed (Regulations Article 15.03):[2]
higher position in the group;
higher number of points;
superior goal difference;
higher number of goals scored;
lower disciplinary points (red card = 3 points, yellow card = 1 point, expulsion for two yellow cards in one match = 3 points).
The teams were allocated to four drawing pots. Teams in the same pot would be drawn into different groups. Each group contains one team from Pot A, one team from Pot B, one team from Pot C, and 12 groups contain one team from Pot D. Based on the decisions taken by the UEFA Emergency Panel, the following pairs of teams could not be drawn in the same group: Spain and Gibraltar, Belarus and Ukraine, Kosovo and Serbia. Due to the current situation, Ukraine, Israel and Belarus cannot host tournaments on their territory.
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Alexander Máni Guðjónsson (5 goals)
