Euro 2028 Simulator: From Your Own Draw to the Final

The Euro 2028 simulator is live, and it works differently from everything else on the site. Everywhere else we hand you a tournament and you play it. Here there is no tournament until you build one.

The reason is simple: the Euro 2028 draw does not exist yet. There are no 24 qualifiers, no pots and no groups. We could have waited two years. Handing you the keys seemed more fun.

You pick the 24

The first screen is all 54 teams eligible for the tournament: the 55 UEFA members bar Russia, who are suspended from the confederation's competitions. That figure of 54 is the one UEFA itself publishes for 2028 qualifying.

You tick twenty-four. There is a search box that copes with missing accents, and if you would rather get going, one button fills the remaining slots with the highest-ranked sides. England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are badged as hosts, because all four are staging it.

The pots build themselves

The moment you have 24, the simulator ranks them by FIFA position and splits them: the six best into pot 1, the next six into pot 2, and so on down to pot 4. There is nothing to adjust on that screen. It is there so you can see where each pot came from before a single ball is drawn.

Then you make the draw

The draw is revealed the way a real ceremony runs: pot 1 empties one team per group, then pot 2, and so on down to pot 4. Draw ball by ball, switch it to automatic and watch it fall, or pull all twenty-four at once.

And you can redo it. As many times as you want. Half the pleasure of a draw is refusing to accept the first one, and we saw no reason to deny you that.

Six groups, and the part nobody explains properly

From there it is 36 matches. Type the scorelines in by hand or simulate the lot, and the six tables rebuild themselves as you go.

The top two in each group go through. That is twelve. But the round of 16 needs sixteen, and the missing four come from the third-placed sides. Underneath the groups you will find the third-place table, ranked on points, goal difference and goals scored, with a line marking the cut.

That table is what explains why one team on four points goes home and another on four points survives. It is the most-consulted screen of every Euro and the worst-explained one almost everywhere.

The table that decides who plays whom

Here is the detail almost nobody knows: the opponent for each third-placed side is not drawn. It is decided in advance.

Depending on which four groups produce a qualifying third — there are fifteen possible combinations — an official table says which group winner hosts which third-placed team. If the thirds come from C, D, E and F you get one set of ties; if they come from A, B, C and D you get another. No pot involved.

The simulator applies that table in full, all fifteen rows.

How we know it is right

A table copied by hand is a table that can be copied wrong, so we checked it two ways.

First by construction: each of the fifteen rows has to hand out its four groups exactly once. All fifteen do.

The second check is the convincing one. We fed the engine the real groups from Euro 2024 — where the thirds from C, D, E and F went through — and asked it for the round of 16. It returned the eight ties that were actually played: Spain-Georgia, Germany-Denmark, Portugal-Slovenia, France-Belgium, England-Slovakia, Switzerland-Italy, Romania-Netherlands and Austria-Türkiye.

"Eight out of eight. Not just the third-placed ties: the entire Euro 2024 round of 16, rebuilt from the group tables."

The tiebreaker inside each group is the official one too, with head-to-head ahead of overall goal difference. That is the reverse of how nearly everyone assumes it works, and it is why every Euro produces a table that looks wrong and is not.

What we did not make up

The pots come from the FIFA ranking of July 2026, the first published after the World Cup. Of the 54 teams, 24 sit inside the world top 50 and carry their real position: Spain 1st, France 3rd, England 4th, Germany 12th.

The other thirty fall outside that top 50, and there you will see a dash instead of a number. We could have given them an approximate position and almost nobody would have noticed. That is exactly why we did not: a made-up figure under a heading that says FIFA ranking is the kind readers believe without checking. They are ordered by strength, but without pretending to an official number we do not have.

Same goes for the draw restrictions. The real draw will carry constraints by host and by qualifying route, and they are not here because they depend on a qualifying campaign nobody has played yet.

The tournament ahead

Euro 2028 is hosted by England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Twenty-four teams, six groups and a sixteen-team knockout, the same format used in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

There are two years of qualifying before anyone knows who is in. Until then the bracket is yours: put in whoever you fancy, redraw until you get a group of death you like the look of, and take your country to the final. Or tear it up and start again. It costs nothing.