The draw for the fourth and final round of qualification for the UEFA Europa League will be made on Friday and it will define Villa’s first action in the tournament. UEFA competitions can often seem pretty complicated at first glance, but I find that they’re a lot like those old 3D magic eye images in that if you stare at them long enough, eventually they just fall into place.

I don’t want to count our chickens, but I’m going to assume that we’re at least going to qualify for the group stage, so I’ve created a new page dedicated to Villa’s Europa Cup fixtures and results. I’m going to use this post to explain the process between now and the group stage.

Wednesday 5th August
15 losing teams from Champions League 3rd Qualifying Round (10 Champions + 5 Non-Champions) are eliminated from the the competition and enter into the Europa League.

Thursday 6th August 2009
Europa League 3rd Qualifying Round completed and 35 winners entered into 4th Qualifying Round.

Friday 7th August 2009
Draw for the Europa League 4th Qualifying Round will feature the 15 teams from Champions League, plus 35 winners from 3rd Qualifying Round and 26 teams qualifying from nations ranked 1 to 17 entering the tournament for the first time – Aston Villa & Everton – making a total of 76 teams.

The 76 teams will be divided into two groups of 38 seeded and 38 unseeded teams. The seeded teams will each be drawn against an unseeded opponent to play over two legs, home and away. Villa will be a seeded team.

Our unseeded opponent could be as strong as Odense or Red Star Belgrade for example, but equally could be as weak as Aktobe from Kaziskistan or Tallinn from Estonia. (A trip to Tallinn would be a lot of fun, trust me!). There’s no regional division anymore, so the reality is that Villa could be drawn against any of the 38 unseeded teams. *

Thursday 20th & 27th August 2009
Fourth Round Qualifying First & Second Leg Matches.

Friday 28th August 2009
The draw for Europa League Group Stage will feature the 38 winning teams from the 4th Round plus 10 losing teams from Champions League 4th Qualifying Round (5 Champions + 5 Non-Champions) making a total of 48 teams.

The 48 teams will be placed into one of 4 seeded pots, 12 in each. Aston Villa will more than likely be a 3rd seed team.

The teams in each pot will then be drawn into 12 groups so that each group has a team from each of the four seeded pots.

Each team will play the other three teams in their group twice, home and away, and the group winner and runner-up will qualify for the knock-out stages.

All of the match dates for the entire competition can be found on the Europa League page.

If this is as clear as mud, maybe this flow chart will help. Then again, maybe not. (click for full size)

* EDIT: Actually, the 76 teams were split into 8 groups prior to the draw. This information wasn’t available until the day of the draw. In fact, Villa could have only drawn Genoa, Rapid Vienna, CD Nacional, St Patrick’s or Maribor. They drew Rapid.