Has the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) draw revealed that four Balkan countries will compete against each other in the 2024 European Football Championship? No, that's not true. The draw rules prohibit two of the countries from playing against each other and Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, and Croatia are all in separate groups.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here). It was viewed 1.9 million times by the time of writing. It was published on July 29, 2023 under the title "croatia [sic] is the calmest ☠️ | CHEAP FOOTBALL SHIRTS IN BIO | #fyp #footballtiktok #balkan."
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Aug 9 20:20:16 2023 UTC)
At the video's end, the TikToker shows a picture of group F which says that Kosovo, Serbia, Albania and Croatia would all be in this group. This is fake, the UEFA website shows that Kosovo was drawn for Group I, Serbia was drawn for Group G, Albania was drawn for Group E and Croatia was drawn for Group D.
The draw for Euro 2024 took place on October 9, 2022 in Frankfurt, Germany. UEFA, which runs the Euro tournaments, published the procedure and rules 19 days before the qualifying draw. Under the section titled "prohibited team clashes" UEFA lists teams that cannot be drawn into the same group including Kosovo and Serbia.
An article by Deutsche Welle explains that the ban on Kosovo and Serbia competing in the tournaments came into force in 2016. Two years earlier, a qualifying match between the two countries had to be abandoned after a drone flew an Albanian flag over the stadium which led to a brawl involving players and fans. According to a Guardian article, written after the clash, UEFA considers three criteria for keeping teams apart: Whether they have normal diplomatic relations, whether there is an ongoing military or armed conflict and whether there is a request made by either national association to be kept apart.
