With the first round of qualifying nearly done, it’s a good time to take a look around the world to see how things are shaping up. Four more qualifiers have been confirmed from Asia, with Jordan and Uzbekistan joining Australia, Iran, South Korea, Japan and the United Arab Emirates at the finals in 2026. In Oceania, New Zealand have secured the region’s one direct qualification spot. The rest of the 48 places at next year’s finals will be decided by the inter-confederation playoffs, with the winners of each confederation’s groups earning three spots.
The race for the European qualifying berths is heating up, with Spain and Portugal among the teams favored to qualify automatically in June. The other top seeds are Germany, Italy, England and the Netherlands, although all have a long road ahead of them.
Africa’s route to the World Cup is by far the most complicated, with nine different groups starting their qualifiers in November 2023. This stage has already seen some surprises, with Madagascar, Sudan and Mali surprisingly making the cut after impressive performances in the opening rounds.
The second round of qualifying began in September 2024, with the ten lowest-ranked nations playing two-legged matches to determine which will advance. These winners joined the thirty-six best-ranked teams from the first round, with the twenty-eight groups divided into six pairs of teams who played home-and-away round-robin matches. The top two in each group qualified for the third round, where they joined the ten runners-up from the first round.