Opinion: CAF should relook at World Cup qualifications
The 10 winners of the hastily completed group phase, held between September and November, have been draw into five ties, from which the aggregate winners qualify for Qatar.
Africa’s race for berth at the 2022 World Cup started back in September 2019 with a round of preliminaries where the bottom 28 teams in the rankings were forced to playoff to see who would advance to join the top 26 in the group competition.
The Covid pandemic then disrupted the flow of the group qualifiers and meant they had to ben eventually squeezed into three-month period and are now followed by the playoffs.
It is the same system as was used for the African qualifiers ahead of the 2014 finals in Brazil but different to the 2018 World Cup qualifiers, where the field in Africa was whittled down to a final 20 teams, then divided into four groups of five with the group winners qualifying for Russia.
I think both qualifying systems fail to bring out the best in African football and do not provide the requisite competition to properly prepare African teams for their appearances at the World Cup.
In Russia, all five African teams failed to make it past the first round with alarm bells ringing loudly about the future of the African game.
Yet neither FIFA nor the Confederation of African Football sought to upgrade the qualifying system and look for ways to provide more competition and tougher matches in the preliminaries to ensure that when the African representatives get to the World Cup finals they have already been severely tested … and have stood tall.
That is why the qualifying system must change for the future and should copy how Asia handles their World Cup campaign.
There, they also have a large number of entries but whittle the field down to a final 16, who are divided into two super groups of eight teams, who play each home and away over a year-long period to determine their representatives.
It ensures a strength versus strength situation, with each qualifier a severe test, and really does mean the best sides come to the top.
A similar scenario in Africa would ensure up dramatic pairings and tough matches, in contrast to some of the weak groups that the fancied teams sailed through in these 2022 qualifiers.
Senegal, for example, romped past Congo, Namibia and Togo, barely raising a sweat. With respect to those countries, hardly a taxing task and although the new African champions must now get past Egypt, that is, in effect, the only tough tie they will have had if they qualify for Qatar. Same hold true for the Egyptians, and for Algeria, Morocco and Nigeria.
CAF needs to reconsider the African qualifying process and give our representatives better preparation in the preliminaries itself.
For the 2026 World Cup, the field is being increased to 48 teams and there will be four extra places for Africa, taking the continent’s tally to nine.
The way to ensure that qualifying offers rigorous competition is to reduce the field by way of knockout rounds to 16 teams – divide them into two groups of eight. The top four in each group qualifies automatically and there is a play off for ninth place between the two fifth-placed finishers, adding in a little
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