Group coordinators have a key role in shaping coherent policy agendas in European Parliament (EP) committees and in building consensus about the party line among the group's specialists. They also yield considerable discretion and influence legislative outcomes through their selection of rapporteurs. This article builds and expands on previous research to analyse longitudinally the determinants of group coordinator selection. The EP's gradual empowerment to co‐legislator status has arguably increased the stakes of selecting competent group coordinators. Drawing on a unique dataset that includes all party group coordinators of the European People's Party in seven terms of the EP (1984–2019), the article shows that committee incumbency, coordinator seniority and, to a lesser extent, ideological proximity to the committee contingent influence who becomes a coordinator. The results are robust to replication of analyses on a sample of Socialists and Democrats Members of the European Parliament and to controlling for several factors associated with partisan and distributive theories of committee organisation.