Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Africa’s World Cup Qualifiers Draw Kicks off


Tue 21 Jan 2020 | 07:00 PM
Mohamed Helba

Africa’s draw for the World Cup 2022 qualifiers kicked off on Tuesday at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Cairo, Egypt.

The fourteen teams which qualified from the preliminary stage will join the 26 exempted teams. The forty teams will be pided into ten groups of Four teams.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Confederation of the African Football (CAF) revealed the four pots of the draw as the teams are pided into Four Pots based on the latest FIFA World Rankings (December 2019).

Here are the Four Pots:

Pot 1: Senegal, Tunisia, Nigeria, Algeria, Morocco, Ghana, Egypt, Cameroon, Mali, DR Congo

Pot 2: Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, Guinea, Uganda, Cape Verde, Gabon, Benin, Zambia, Congo

Pot 3: Madagascar, Mauritania, Libya, Mozambique, Kenya, Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, Niger, Namibia, Guinea Bissau

Pot 4: Malawi, Angola, Togo, Sudan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Liberia, Djibouti

The Dates of the Group Stage rounds are as follows: 

1st Round: From October 5 to October 13

2nd Round: From November  9 to November 17

3rd & 4th Round: From March 22, 2021 to March 30, 2021

5th Round: From August 30, 2021 to September 7, 2021

6th Round: From October 4, 2021 to October 12, 2021.

Here is the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifiers format for Africa:

1. The winners of the groups will be advanced to the knock-out stage.

2. The ten teams will be pided into two levels based on the FIFA ranking. The 5 highest ranked teams will face the lowest-ranked ones.

3. The winners of the first and second legs on aggregate will qualify for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.