The Board has discussed the deadlines for submitting the qualified teams.

Previous leadership has moved this deadline to December 31st/January 1st, which caused problems for some NGBs, because of interference with their seasons. The board has considered these issues and has decided on a new system that incorporates the deadline from previous leadership but in a modified way.

Instead of just one single deadline where all qualified teams must be submitted to QE, there will now be 2 deadlines:

1. By January 1st 23:59 CET, each NGB must confirm their allocated spots to QE.
2. By March 1st 23:59 CET, each qualified team must confirm their attendance at the respective Division.

Now that the technical stuff is said, let me explain what this means.

• The first deadline (NGBs confirming their spots) means that each NGB confirms that they have enough teams to fill every single allocated spot in either division. At this point there is no requirement to already state which teams will receive these spots. This is just a statement from the NGB that they oblige to fill every spot with a team.
• The second deadline (teams confirming their attendance) means that the qualified teams accept their spot at the respective division and will confirm to all connected obligations (e.g. team fees, volunteer/official quotas, etc.).

The confirmation of teams to attend the event is already common practice, so this would just make it more formal and tie it to a deadline. In turn this will make it also easier for the committees to plan as they already have a set time for when all attending teams are known.

As you may have noticed, there is no explicit deadline to when the qualified teams have to be submitted to QE. The board does not think that it makes a lot of sense to have an additional deadline for this in place. Especially, considering the different qualification procedures and season in place.
However, the qualified teams must be submitted to QE at some point before the 2nd deadline in order to allow the teams to confirm their attendance. Otherwise there is no way to contact the teams for said confirmation, which would then exclude them from the event.
The board recommends to submit the qualified teams as soon as they are decided to give said teams enough time to confirm their attendance.

As a rule of thumb: there should be more than two weeks between submitting the teams to QE and the 2nd deadline!

How exactly these confirmations by NGBs and teams will take place is yet to be decided, but it will likely be as simple as filling out a 1-2 question google form provided by the board (e.g. simply checking off a statement that says “yes, we confirm to fill all our allocated spots” and clicking submit).

To be transparent, we might run into the situation where we will require some obligations to be fulfilled even before the 2nd deadline. This can include e.g. payment of team fees. We expect that if this becomes the case, then it will be connected to division 2 rather than division 1. This is because division 2 is earlier than division 1.
However, at this point this is pure speculation and will depend on the date of the event and the agreement with our event partners. In any case the board will then contact the NGBs impacted by this and work out a solution together. From past experiences the vast majority of NGBs will not be affected by this!

The board hopes that with these new deadlines we have reached a good compromise between an earlier deadline which gives the board and the committees more time to plan for the event but still giving enough time for those NGBs that have their qualifiers rather late in their seasons.

Now, to answer a few question that might come up:

• What if an NGB fails to confirm their spots?

Failing to confirm the spots will be considered as a forfeit of the allocated spots for this NGB. These spots will then be re-allocated according to the algorithm.

• What if a team fails to confirm their spots?

Just as in the case of NGBs, if a team fails to confirm their attendance it will be considered as a forfeit. In this case the team next-in-line in the respective NGB gets the spot according to the qualification procedure in place in said NGB.

• What if my NGB does not know whether we can fill our allocated spots?

If you don’t know, then you have time until the 1st deadline (January 1st) to wait and see how the situation develops. When the deadline hits, you must make a decision to either forfeit of confirm the spots.

• What if an NGB/team confirms their spots/attendance and then finds out they can’t?

In this situation there will an evaluation by the board on a case-by-case basis.
However, in general there will be penalties in place to prevent NGBs/teams from just blindly confirming their spots/attendance to not fall into the risk of forfeiting them. These penalties are needed, otherwise the entire purpose of this system of deadlines would be defeated.
The extend of the penalties is yet to be decided, but can go as far as the respective NGB losing spots in the following year’s allocation, resp. the team being banned for the following year.