The road to the 2012 UEFA European championship gets going today, with a full slate of matches: England v Bulgaria is perhaps the one to watch (and is the most accessible to watch in the US: it’s on FSC & FSE at 3pm ET), with a number of additional matches to be streamed on ESPN3.

Most of the latter look to be mismatches (Andorra v Russia, Estonia v Italy, San Marino v Netherlands, Portugal v Cyprus…Liechtenstein v Spain!).  But a few matches that look like they could be more interesting: Sweden v Hungary, Belgium v Germany, and France v Belarus (given the extraordinary French showing in South Africa).

The aim for all these European sides is to end up in Poland and Ukraine in June 2012 (via UEFA,com: “The final tournament of the 14th UEFA European Football Championship will be held in Poland and Ukraine from 8 June to 1 July 2012. It will be the third time that the final tournament is jointly hosted by two countries (after Belgium/Netherlands in 2000 and Austria/Switzerland in 2008).”)  But the road to Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Donetsk, Lviv, Kharkiv and Kyiv is a long and nearly indecipherable one…

Sixteen teams will compete in Poland and Ukraine.  There are 51 teams in the qualifiers that will compete for the remaining 14 spots (the hosts qualify automatically).  The 51 teams have been placed in 9 groups: 6 groups consisting of 6 sides and 3 groups of 5.  Each group will play round robin home-and-away.   Finally (but not really): “At the conclusion of qualifying, the team at the top of each group will qualify automatically. The second-placed team with the most points from games versus the first-, third-, fourth- and fifth-placed teams will qualify also. The remaining eight second-placed teams will contest two-legged playoffs for the right to join them.”  (9 group winners + 1 top 2nd-place side + 4 (out of the other 8 2nd-placed teams) = 14!)

We won’t even get (too deeply) into how the groups were chosen: according to a seeding system based on 6 “pots” (determined by something called the UEFA national team cofficient!)  Though it is interesting to compare the castes of European footballing.  The likes of Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands head up Pot 1, while Pot 6 contains Azerbaijan, Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino, Malta and Faroe Islands.)