UEFA - The Union of European Football Associations is the organization responsible for hosting international competitions in this sport in Europe. The most significant of its tournaments are the European National Teams Championship and two annual club cup competitions. For the selection of participants and their distribution into tournament groups, this organization makes up special ratings.
UEFA compiles and regularly recalculates three coefficient tables to reflect the latest changes - the ratings of national teams, football associations and individual clubs. The club rating is, rather, a purely informational table - its data are not directly taken into account when holding European cup football tournaments. Today, places in the Champions League and the European Cup, the two annual UEFA club competitions, are allocated according to quotas allocated to each country. To calculate the size of these quotas, the table of ratings of football associations is used. The countries occupying the first three lines in it have the right to declare the maximum number of clubs for participation in the cups - 7 (4 in the Champions League and 3 in the European Cup). The next three countries may have one fewer Champions League representatives, etc. The Russian Football Federation now ranks 9th on the list, which gives it the right to 2 participants in the Champions League and 4 in the second strongest European club tournament - the European Cup.
Another table of ratings takes into account the games of national teams of European countries at the World and European Championships. UEFA uses the data from it when distributing teams into groups at the stages of the preliminary selection first, and then the final part of the European Championship. To do this, the table is divided into several groups - "baskets" - with an equal number of countries, and then the drawing of lots for the distribution of national teams into groups is carried out separately for each basket. At the preliminary stage of the European Championship there are 6 such baskets, and as a result of the draw, each group will have one team from each of them. In this way, a situation is excluded in which the strongest teams can gather in one group, and vice versa in the other. The Russian national team in the draw at the qualifying stage of the 2012 European Championship took the 9th place and got into the first basket, and there is still no table by which the basket of the next championship will be determined.
