Adrian Kavanagh's Blog

Adrian Kavanagh, 29 January 2024

Figure 1: Countries assigned to different “pots” for the semi-final allocation draw for Eurovision Song Contest 2024 (Australia will be in Pot 2)

The semi-final allocation draw for the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Malmö on 30 January. This will tell us what countries (out of the 31 countries that do not qualify directly for the Final) will take part in Semi Final 1 (on Tuesday 7 May) or Semi Final 2 (on Thursday 9 May), which semi-final will be allocated to the “Big 5″/Host countries (Sweden, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Italy and France) to vote in, and whether a country gets to vote in the first half or second half of the semi-final that they have been drawn into.

The 31 countries that will be taking part in the semi-finals have been allocated to one of five pots. In previous years six pots were involved, so this overall reduction in the numbers of pots does reflect the overall drop in the number of countries taking part in Eurovision over the past few years – 43 countries took part in the 2018 contest in Lisbon, for instance. The pots are drawn up on the basis of post voting trends in order to, as the official Eurovision website puts it, “reduce the chance of so-called neighbourly voting and increase suspense in the Semi-Finals”.