Remember a couple of years ago, when footage leaked of a new, “X Factor-style” presentation of the Eurovision semi-final qualifiers? Immediate uproar from the online fandom followed – presumably accompanied by complaints behind the scenes from various delegations – and the decision was quickly reversed.

However, the Eurovision organising team are clearly still keen to make changes – when are they ever not? – and ESC Discord duly broke the news over on Bluesky this morning:

Any regular visitor to our #esc chat events will know exactly what this sounds like: a truel! That’s what we call it when three songs compete for one ticket, such as the final qualification slot for the SongHunt final, and the word has entered our chatters’ vocabulary as a result. We just didn’t expect to see it come to life on the ESC stage too…

Of course, in the ESC context the truel losers won’t be eliminated (yet) – they can still make it through in the next truel, and the next, and the next…

So what is the thinking behind this “truel” approach to revealing the qualifiers at the climax of the Eurovision semi-finals? We’ve been racking our brains and we must admit it’s not immediately obvious. “It’ll make good TV” is invariably the motivation in such cases, and this system would undoubtedly spoon-feed qualification drama to the viewer by giving them ten microdoses of excited and disappointed delegations in succession. But to what benefit?

We’ve actually seen this kind of thing before – the ESC editions around 2009/2010 spring immediately to mind, when the cameras often showed three delegations in the green room “at random” before each qualifier was revealed, but it was invariably one of the countries shown that qualified each time (mainly because a camera needed to be physically next to them to capture their delighted response, after all).

That felt a bit uninteresting even then – especially when one fairly obvious qualifier was accompanied by two fairly obvious non-qualifiers. Formalising the approach feels like it could puncture some of the drama and add unnecessary complication with little in the way of actual gain. And having the eventual non-qualifiers appear as the losing participants in truel after truel after truel feels… well, cruel.

The idea also seems to conflict with the “let’s remove the pressure on the artists” mindset that the EBU is trying to push this year – surely it just means even more tension at what is already a tense time?

There was nothing wrong with the qualifier reveal as it already stood – indeed, in some ways it has arguably become the most exciting part of the entire ESC week, and the phrase “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” exists for a reason. Still, at least this is only a relatively minor development, and it doesn’t alter the essence of what actually happens in the show (“10 of these songs will be seen again on Saturday, let’s find out which ones”). It just doesn’t seem especially… necessary?

Of course, if there’s pushback from the delegations again then we may end up back where we started anyway. Watch this space…