Euro 2016: France will play friendly matches against teams of a qualifying group

Automatically qualified for Euro 2016 as host country, France will play friendly matches against the five teams of Group I, which will be drawn on the 23/02/2014 in Nice, announced UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) after the meeting of its executive committee in Nyon (SUI), on the 24/01/2014.

"This is a very good idea, very appreciated by the French Federation, as automatically qualified teams always struggle to find opponents, since all the other teams are involved in the playoffs," said Michel Platini, president of UEFA.

For the qualifying draw of the first European Championship with 24 teams, UEFA unveiled the composition of the six pots into which the 53 European teams were divided. Neither Belgium nor Switzerland, seeded in the draw for the final phase of the 2014 World Cup, are present in Pot 1.

The criteria used by UEFA are indeed different from those of FIFA:
- FIFA based the composition of the World Cup pots on the FIFA rankings from October 2013. Seeded: Brazil (host country), Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.
- UEFA took into…