The Malta national team were drawn against Moldova and Andorra in the 2024-25 UEFA Nations League as the draw of the competition was held in Paris on Thursday.
Malta is bidding to emulate their female counterparts and win their first promotion to Group C in this year’s competition.
But the draw in Paris handed Michele Marcolini’s team a challenging campaign when they were grouped with Moldova who are coming from a strong display in the Euro 2024 qualifiers where they managed to avoid bottom spot in the group.
The Moldovans managed to pick up no less than ten points in the group that was topped by Albania and Czech Republic, who both finished with 15 points.
And more impressively they managed to claim two wins in the group, 1-0 in Faroe Islands and a 3-2 victory over the highly-rated Poland.
So on this evidence, Marcolini’s team have their work cut out to try and upstage the former Soviet Republic in the group.
On the other hand, Andorra were pitted in the same group of Malta for the second time.
In fact, during the 2020 qualifiers, the national team managed to pick up four points against the Andorrans, a goalless draw in La Vella before claiming a 3-1 win at the National Stadium.
Each team will play four matches in their group, one home and one away against the other two nations in the section.
The two group winners in League D are automatically promoted to League C.
There will be play-offs between the two best-ranked fourth-placed teams from League C and the two runners-up from League D.
The upcoming edition will kick off between September 7 and 10 with the opening couple of Matchdays as Malta will be looking to finally reach the elusive promotion to League C.
Malta FA president Bjorn Vassallo admitted that the draw was not kind to the national team but said the objectives of the association remained the same.
“From all the possible scenarios we were handed the toughest one,” Vassallo said.
“But that doesn’t change nothing in terms of our objective as we will be targeting promotion to League C. We have four matches where we hope to achieve the results we want.
“No doubt, that between September and November we have one target – either direct promotion or through the play-offs – and we need to perform to reach our goal.”
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