Northern Ireland’s men’s Under-21 side will find out tomorrow who they will face in their next set of European qualifiers.
The 2025-27 UEFA European Under-21 Championship qualifying group stage draw is to be streamed live at 09:00 CET tomorrow (Thursday 6 February) on uefa.com.
Group games will take place between next month and October 2026, followed by play-offs in November 2026 ahead of the final tournament in summer 2027 in Albania and Serbia.
Tommy Wright’s side have been ranked as a Pot 4 team for tomorrow’s draw – based on UEFA’s co-efficient ranking system.
The 51 participating teams from across Europe will be drawn into six groups of six teams and three groups of five teams.
The nine group winners and the runner-up with the best record against the top five in their group qualify directly for the final tournament to join co-hosts Albania and Serbia. The eight other runners-up will contest play-offs to determine the four remaining finalists.
Northern Ireland will not face either Scotland or Wales in the qualifiers as they are Pot 4 teams, too. And Pot 4 also features Israel, North Macedonia, Türkiye, Kosovo, Faroe Islands and Moldova.
Their potential opponents include teams in the following pots:
Pot 1: Spain, England, Portugal, Netherlands, Germany, France, Ukraine, Italy, Denmark.
Pot 2: Romania, Switzerland, Croatia, Czechia, Poland, Norway, Belgium, Georgia, Republic of Ireland.
Pot 3: Slovenia, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Slovakia, Greece, Iceland, Hungary, Bulgaria.
Pot 5: Belarus, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Luxembourg.
Pot 6: Estonia, Malta, Armenia, Andorra, Gibraltar, San Marino.
On the basis of previous decisions taken by the UEFA Executive Committee and the UEFA Emergency Panel, the following countries cannot be drawn into the same group: Armenia and Azerbaijan; Belarus and Ukraine; Gibraltar and Spain; Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
If a clash arises, the team drawn will be placed in the first available group in alphabetical order taking into account other possible clashes to be avoided in the remaining groups.
Northern Ireland finished fourth in Group F of the UEFA U21 Euro 2025 qualifiers on 11 points, ahead of Luxembourg (eight points) and Azerbaijan (three points).
Serbia (16 points) finished third in Group F, while Ukraine (24 points) and England (25 points) qualified automatically for the 2025 finals in Slovakia as one of the three best runners-up and the group winners respectively.
