2026 UEFA European Under-19 Championship


The 2026 UEFA European Under-19 Championship will be the 23rd edition of the UEFA European Under-19 Championship, the annual international youth football championship organised by UEFA for the men's under-19 national teams of Europe. Wales, which were selected by UEFA on 26 September 2023, will host the tournament. A total of 8 teams will play in the tournament, with players born on or after [|1] January 2007 eligible to participate.
Same as previous editions held in even-numbered years, the tournament acted as the UEFA qualifiers for the FIFA U-20 World Cup. The top four teams of the tournament qualified for the 2027 FIFA U-20 World Cup in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan as the UEFA representatives besides Azerbaijan who automatically qualified as co-host, with the fifth-placed team advance to the intercontinental play-off series.

Venues

Upon being awarded the tournament in 2023, the Football Association of Wales anticipated that the tournament would be hosted in 5 venues, with a later release no longer stating Deeside or Colwyn Bay as a venue, and replacing it with Caernarfon. Colwyn Bay was named as a training ground for the tournament.. In November 2025, a test event was organised, which involved matches in Denbigh, Wrexham, and Rhyl, the latter not among the initial five named locations but will act as a training venue.

Qualification

Qualified teams

The following teams qualified for the final tournament.
''Note: All appearance statistics include only U-19 era.''

Group stage

The group winners and runners-up advanced to the semi-finals.
Tie-breaking criteria for group play
The ranking of teams in the group stage is determined as follows:
  1. Points obtained in all group matches;
  2. Points in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
  3. Goal difference in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
  4. Goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
  5. 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;
  6. Goal difference in all group matches;
  7. Goals scored in all group matches;
  8. Penalty shoot-out if only two teams have the same number of points, and they met in the last round of the group and are tied after applying all criteria above ;
  9. Disciplinary points
  10. UEFA coefficient for the qualifying round draw;
  11. Drawing of lots.

Qualified teams for FIFA U-20 World Cup

The following five teams from UEFA qualified for the 2027 FIFA U-20 World Cup including Azerbaijan which qualified as co-host. while one team advanced to the inter-confederation play-offs.
TeamQualified onPrevious appearances in FIFA U-20 World Cup1
2 10 20250