Someone posted a link to the format announcement. Thanks!
The qualifying series will begin with a preliminary round involving the bottom 24-bottom FIFA ranked teams according to the latest edition of FIFA ranking.
The 12 teams to qualifiy from the preliminary round will join the 28 teams, on a bye for the next phase.
The top team from each of the 10 groups will qualify for the final play-off, and will play on home and away basis to determine the five slots.
In all, 154 matches will played between November 2011 and November 2013.
PDF file detailing the qualifying format.
Mauritania are the one team not participating and we'll see Sao Tome e Principe return to competitions after 8 years.
This changes the seeding quite a bit. It also depends on what "latest edition" of the FIFA rankings means. April (since the announcement was made on May 16, before the May ranking was published) or July (the latest edition at the time of the draw)?
This post will soon desapear from the front page, but I need to say that if CAF had already the hardest qualifying in the world, they manage to make it even harder.
ReplyDeleteThose playoffs will probably be for the ages!
I agree. That final play-off round will be cruel. CAF has much more quality and depth now than on previous occasions when they had a play-off round to distribute the spots and there is simply no room for mistake. This has the potential to produce a host of new qualifiers again, just like the 2006 qualifiers did, but I have the feeling it's not the right way to go for CAF. They already struggle to perform at the WC and when you put teams like Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and CIV at such a great risk of missing out, you could be sending teams like Togo and Angola, who, honestly, were never going to rock the world as we know the aforementioned teams can all do on their day. And Africa simply can't afford not to send their best teams to the cup.
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