Aug 19, 2020
Canada to learn path to 2022 World Cup with CONCACAF draw
Canada's path to a berth in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar will become clearer with Wednesday afternoon's CONCACAF preliminary draw. You can catch the CONCACAF World Cup qualifiers preliminary draw LIVE at 1pm et/10am pt on TSN.ca.
TSN.ca Staff
Canada's path to a berth in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar will become clearer with Wednesday afternoon's CONCACAF preliminary draw.
You can catch the CONCACAF World Cup qualifiers preliminary draw LIVE at 1pm et/10am pt.
For the World Cup, set to get underway in Qatar in late November of 2022, CONCACAF has been allotted 3.5 spaces in the tournament, which means three teams will qualify automatically through the confederation's qualification system and another will have the chance to qualify through a playoff against a team from another confederation.
Qualifying for CONCACAF occurs in three phases. In the first round, the 30 lowest ranked teams in the confederation (6 to 35th) will be divided into six groups of five (A, B, C, D, E and F). Each team will play every other team once - two matches at home and two matches away - and the first-place team in each group will advance to the second stage of qualifying.
In the second round, the top teams from each group will meet in a home-and-home elimination tie over two legs: A vs. F, B vs. E and C vs. D.
Then in the final round, the three victors from the second stage will join CONCACAF's top five teams (Mexico, United States, Costa Rica, Jamaica and Honduras) in a round-robin tournament. The top three teams will advance to the World Cup, while the fourth-place team will take part in a playoff. The playoff is set for June of 2022.
For the purposes of Wednesday's draw, the 30 teams have been allocated into five pots based on FIFA ranking (as of July 20) and each group will be made up of one team from each pot.
The pots are as follows:
POT 1 - El Salvador, CANADA, Curacao, Panama, Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago
POT 2 - Antigua and Barbuda, Guatemala, St. Kitts and Nevis, Suriname, Nicaragua and Dominican Republic
POT 3 - Grenada, Barbados, Guyana, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Bermuda and Belize
POT 4 - St. Lucia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Monserrat, Dominica and Cayman Islands
POT 5 - Bahamas, Aruba, Turks and Caicos, US Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands and Anguilla