With the season barely over, interest in the next Champions League and UEFA Cup competitions is already on the increase as the local clubs – Valletta, Birkirkara and Marsaxlokk – are eager to know who could be their opponents in the qualifying rounds in July.

Not even one of the Maltese trio of clubs is seeded this year. And one can see from the groups below that it is going to be a very tough draw for the Maltese clubs.

Seeding is used for the first and second qualifying rounds as well as for the first round and the group stage. The number of teams of each country is determined by the position in the UEFA Country Ranking 2006, extended with 11 Intertoto + 3 Fair Play teams for the UEFA Cup.

Besides the division of teams into seeded and unseeded teams, the teams in the first and second qualifying round as well as the first round may be divided into a number of groups based on economic interests of the participating clubs.

One of the goals of these groups is to avoid the pairing of teams from the same country. In the qualifying rounds groups will also be formed based on geographical criteria. Each group has the same number of seeded and unseeded teams, and a seeded team will always play against an unseeded team.

The UEFA Cup cup-holder spot will not be used because Zenit St. Petersburg qualified for the Champions league. This implies that the cup winner of the 14th country on the country ranking list (Kayserispor, Turkey) will gain direct access to the first round, and that the cup winners of the 19th and 20th countries on the ranking list (Israel and Serbia) have direct access to the second qualifying round of the UEFA Cup.

In the qualifying rounds the seeding system based on club coefficients ranking applies within each group. Compliance with the regions is implemented as far as possible.

There are three regions:

Southern-Mediterranean: Albania, Andorra, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Italy, Macedonia, Malta, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey.

Central-East: Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland, and Ukraine.

Northern: Belgium, Denmark, England, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, and Wales.

Because there are an odd number of teams in the Central and Southern groups in the first qualifying round, it is assumed that UEFA will move the team of San Marino from the Southern to the Central group.