England Supporters Club

Matthew Isle

Specifically on St Petersburg hosting matches (and I guess Scotland qualification), has anyone an update on the WADA threats to ban Russia athletes and venues from all major events.

The press rumours now are that Russia will be found to have tried to deceive the WADA investigation and that they may be thrown out of international sporting competitions immediately. If so, Russia would lose their place at the Euro 2020 tournament and St Petersburg will have their hosting rights withdrawn.

There would have to be a new host city chosen. When Brussels was thrown off the roster for not building the promised new stadium, the cities competing for their hosting rights were Wembley, Cardiff and Stockholm. The rights were awarded to Wembley. St Petersburg is currently a host city for Group B. There is a 50/50 chance that Wales will be drawn into Group B anyway so, if Cardiff were still interested, they could become the other Group B host city. Choosing Stockholm or anywhere else would require a re-draw so that the host country could be placed into the group of the host city.

If Russia are thrown out, can we assume it will necessarily be the case that Scotland will replace them just because they were in the same qualification group ? There are 9 non-qualified teams who had a better record than Scotland in the qualification competition. Couldn't the spare place could go to one of them ? The highest ranked was Serbia.

If it is Scotland who are promoted to automatic qualification, I doubt whether there would be a draw to see who hosts the head to head : Wembley or Hampden Park. This is because the fixture list will already have been determined on 30th November. Besides, you could hardly refer to Scotland's luck as qualifying directly.