UEFA competitions: roll backwards – Russian teams are not allowed to take part

Football UEFA competitions

Roll backwards – Russian teams are not allowed to take part

As of: 6:20 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes

UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin

Those: dpa/Armando Franca

Russian youth teams are now being left out of UEFA for the time being. A solution to integrate U17 selections into the ongoing European Championship qualification has not been found. UEFA had cleared the way for this. The topic remains controversial.

Despite being re-approved by the European Football Union (Uefa), Russia’s U17 football teams cannot take part in the ongoing European Championship qualification. “The item was removed from the agenda because no technical solution could be found that would allow Russian teams to play,” the European Football Union said in response to a request after the UEFA Executive Committee meeting in Nyon on Tuesday.

At the end of September, the committee of the continental association decided to allow Russian junior teams to take part in European competitions again – but without an anthem and flag. There was sharp criticism of this. More than ten associations had announced that they would not compete against Russian teams. The groups for the first qualifying round for the 2025 European Championship have already been drawn. The first junior games have already taken place.

The German Football Association recently declared that it did not want to join a boycott of games against Russian youth teams. Hans-Joachim Watzke, the German representative on the UEFA Executive Committee, had previously defended the decision to allow youth teams from Russia to take part in continental competitions again. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge is also a member of the decision-making body as a representative from Germany.

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