In an official announcement today, we now know the final details about the Semi Final Allocation Draw for Eurovision 2024 will take place in Malmö on Tuesday, 30th of January! The presenters of this event will be Pernilla Månsson Colt and Farah Abadi.

This event will be broadcast live on official Eurovision YouTube channel starting at 19:00 CET (10:00 in San Francisco, 05:00 Wednesday in Sydney).

What is an ‘Allocation Draw’ anyway?

Simply put, this is the event where we will find out in which of the two Semi Finals each country will compete this May. Yet there is some more pomp and circumstance to it.

What to expect

Early on at the event, there is the prescribed ‘handing over’ ceremony. The mayor of Liverpool (Steve Rotheram) is expected to ceremonially “hand over” the event to the mayor of Malmö (Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh).

Since in 2007, a special commemorative insignia has been added to a large keyring fob by the previous host city. This item is getting quite heavy and weighs in excess of 30kg (photo)!

In the first part of the draw, the pre-qualifying countries are assigned one of the two Semi Finals to vote in. These are the ‘Big 5‘ countries (France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Spain), plus last year’s winner Sweden. These six countries are not drawn from the pots as they will automatically perform in the Grand Final and do not compete in the Semis.

That leaves 31 Semi Final countries that are grouped into five ‘pots’ based on their historic voting patterns. This is done in an attempt to making the voting more equitable. This reduces the chances that each Semi Final will not be populated by countries with higher chances of voting for each other.

This year’s pots look like this:

It’s then time to assign the countries to a Semi Final, and then decide which half of the running order they will sing in by drawing lots. A host will draw one country at a time, moving from one pot to the next, until each Semi Final is populated by 15 or 16 countries.

As each country learns in which Semi Final it will perform, another draw will occur immediately to decide whether it will perform in the first or second half of the running order in that Semi.

The precise running order will be determined later (usually in April) by the show’s producers and the EBU once all songs have been submitted by mid-March. This entire process will be overseen by the Executive Supervisor of the EBU, Martin Österdahl.

Finally, some national broadcasters make special requests to be placed in a specific Semi Final. This is usually due to scheduling conflicts. If the EBU Reference Group has approved any of these requests, it will be made known at the Draw.

If you’ve never seen one before, below you can watch last year’s Semi Final Allocation Draw in Liverpool’s St George’s Hall, to get a better idea of how the event in Malmö will unfold!