Cup of Nations qualifying draw at SuperSport studios

SuperSport studios in Johannesburg will on Thursday host the draw for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers, where cup-winning coach Emerse Fae from the Ivory Coast will be the main attraction.

Time: 14:30 CAT (12:30 GMT)

Fae will be the draw assistant, pulling balls bearing the team’s names out of the various pots, to determine the pairings for the qualifiers, which get underway in September.

Fae took over the Ivorian side in mid-tournament in January and helped the Ivorians, who had limped through the first round, emerge victorious in the last Cup of Nations tournament.

As was the case for the last qualifiers, a total of 48 countries, including hosts Morocco, will be drawn into 12 groups of four teams each.

The 48 teams have been seeded, according to the latest Fifa rankings, and are in four different pots.

The top 12 teams are in pot one, the next 12 in the second pot and so on, and one team from each of the pots goes into a group.

The qualifiers for Morocco will kick off in September and be completed by November with two matches in each of the international windows in September, October and November.

The top two in each group qualifies except the group in which Morocco will play where only one team besides the host advances to the finals tournament.

The three month window for the qualifiers are the quickest they have ever been conducted but dates for next year are reserved for the preliminaries for the 2026 World Cup in North America.

The 2025 Cup of Nations finals were recently put back six months by the Confederation of African Football and will now be played from December 21, 2025 to January 18, 2026.

The tournament was supposed to take place in mid-2025 but has been shifted because of Fifa’s new expanded Club World Cup with 32 teams in the United States next June and July. Moving the 2025 finals to a December kick off, rather than January 2026, also avoids a clash with the expanded Champions League in Europe.

The seedings for the draw are (with latest Fifa ranking in parenthesis):

Pot One: Morocco (12; hosts), Senegal (18), Egypt (36), Ivory Coast (37; holders), Nigeria (38), Tunisia (41), Algeria (44), Cameroon (49), Mali (50), South Africa (59), DR Congo (61), Ghana (64)

Pot Two: Cape Verde Islands (65), Burkina Faso (67), Guinea (77), Gabon (83), Equatorial Guinea (89), Zambia (90), Benin (91), Angola (92), Uganda (94), Namibia (97), Mozambique (103), Madagascar (104)

Pot Three: Kenya (108), Mauritania (112), Congo (113), Tanzania (114), Guinea-Bissau (115), Libya (118), Comoros (119), Togo (120), Sudan (121), Sierra Leone (122), Malawi (125), Central African Republic (127)

Pot Four: Niger (128), Zimbabwe (129), Rwanda (131), Gambia (132), Burundi (140), Liberia (142), Ethiopia (143), Botswana (145), Lesotho (149), Eswatini (154), South Sudan (167), Chad (178).