The qualification play-offs for the 2009 UEFA European Under-21 Football Championship took place from 10 October to 15 October 2008. The ten group winners and four best runners-up from the qualifying group stage were drawn together in pairs in order to determine the seven teams that joined hosts Sweden at the 2009 UEFA European Under-21 Football Championship.
Famous quotes containing the words european and/or football:
“Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)