- The African race for places at Qatar 2022 is set to start
- 28 nations are invovled in the first round
- The 14 winners to join 26 exempted teams in next phase
After Asia got the ball rolling last month, it is now the turn of Africa to set its sight of the 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar™. Just ten days after Algeria triumphed at the CAF Africa Cup of Nations 2019, the continent will stage its draw for the first round of qualifying for football’s flagship event.
FIFA.com fills you in on all you need to know about this event.
The draw in brief
🗓️ ️ Date: Monday 29 July
⏰ Time: 12:00 (Central European Time)
🏛️ Place: CAF Headquarters, Cairo (Egypt)
Draw coverage
The ceremony will be live streamed on the Twitter and Facebook accounts of the Confederation of African Football.
The qualification process
Only 28 of the continent’s teams – those ranked lowest in July’s edition of the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking – will be involved in the draw. Those sides will be paired off for home-and-away knockout fixtures.
The teams involved in the first qualifying round are as follows: Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Seychelles, Sao Tome, Chad, South Sudan, Gambia, Mauritius, Liberia, Ethiopia, Comoros, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Togo, Malawi, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Namibia, Central African Republic and Tanzania.
The 14 winners will join the continent’s top-ranked 26 sides, who have been exempted from the initial round of qualifiers. Those 40 teams will then be split into ten groups of four for the second qualifying round.
The ten winners of those groups will then be drawn against each other in home-and-away fixtures, with the five victors advancing to Qatar 2022.
