After the announcement last that Valencia, Spain and Lyon, France would host the group stages and quarterfinals and Paris would host the last four teams in the 2021 continental championship, the qualifying draw was conducted today.
The 33 remaining teams were drawn into 9 groups of 3 or 4 teams. After the double round-robin, each group winner will qualify. The second place teams in four teams groups will have their games against the last place team removed and then the top five among them will be awarded the final spots. Due to the Olympic qualifying process in February, these games will be played in November in both 2019 and 2020 and then finished in February of 2021.
Groups B, D, E, F, and G are the ones with two teams that qualified for the last edition of the tournament and there figure to be some real battles forthcoming for the group lead and the automatic qualification. Group B in particular will have all of the teams entering the games with the expectation of qualifying. After there were even groups for the last set of qualifiers, Denmark has finally decided to return to competition, getting drawn into Group D.
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