It’s that time of year again! Never mind the Albanian final or the slow trickle of news about internal selections – the allocation draw for the forthcoming ESC is when we really know the on-season is underway, even if (as always) there’s only so much we can really learn from the outcome at this early stage.

This afternoon saw the allocation draw for the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest taking place at the City Hall in Rotterdam. As in recent years, the countries had previously been divided into “pots” based on their voting history with the aim of ensuring a balanced spread across the two semi-finals. To allow the delegations to make their travel plans based on the preliminary rehearsal schedule, the participating countries were also assigned to either the first or second half of the respective show.

We also discovered that, with an uneven number of countries (41) taking part this year, the first semi-final will have 17 entries and the second will be notionally more competitive with 18.

The draw was as follows:

The “big five” countries and the Netherlands, who are already qualified for the grand final, were also assigned to the semi-finals that they are required to broadcast and vote in:

Germany, Italy and the Netherlands will vote in the first semi-final on Tuesday 12 May.
France, Spain and the United Kingdom will vote in the second semi-final on Thursday 14 May.

As has been the case since ESC 2013, the exact order of performance will be decided by the producers once all the entries have been chosen, the aim being to create a varied and interesting running order.