Quote Originally Posted by Des Parrot View Post
If Poland get their shit together, they’ll push Czech out and they become the highest ranked team. There seems no criteria where Wales/Cymru would be the highest ranked team. Wales can only qualify via path A as B and C are for the lower ranked teams from those divisions, currently Israel & Georgia in pole positions.
We tied ourselves in knots in Latvia trying to understand the system but our best take is this which is shown in this helpful Wiki site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_E...ying_play-offs

Teams are placed into four paths based on which league they played in in the last Nations League, ranked by performance in those leagues.

The starting point is that all group winners are guaranteed a play-off spot though the highest ranked Group D team (Estonia) is a bit of a floater.

If they qualify automatically the spot goes to the next highest ranked team in that path.

If there are insufficient non-qualifiers in a path you take the highest ranked team from the path below (excluding Group Winners)

So in path A at the moment the only teams currently outside the play off spots are Poland and Wales. That means a ranked team (currently one of three possible teams (Finland, Ukraine, Iceland) from Path B and Estonia will be in the A play-off semi-finals.

The highest ranked team will play the 4th highest at home and the 2nd playing the third in the same manner. Currently that means Poland vs Estonia and Wales vs (Finland, Ukraine, Iceland).

The home team for the final in each path is drawn rather than given to the highest ranked team.

So in the example you gave above if Poland qualify at the expense of Czech Republic it would be Czech Republic vs Estonia. But if they both qualify at the expense of Albania (and all other teams in Path A also qualify) then Wales would be the highest remaining seed and play Estonia home in the semi-final.