The FIFA and Asian Football Confederation (AFC) on Wednesday announced postponing the qualifying games for the FIFA World cup 2022 Qatar to 2021.
FIFA also issued a statement on its official website, “In light of the current COVID-19 situation in many countries, FIFA and the Asian Confederation (AFC) have jointly decided that the upcoming qualifying matches for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ and AFC Asian Cup China 2023, originally scheduled to take place during the international match windows in October and November 2020, will be rescheduled to 2021.”
The qualifying events were slated to take place between October and November this year but it has finally been pushed to next year. However, the dates have not been finalized but the apex council will have a discussion with AFC and will finalize the date.
“With the aim of protecting the health and safety of all participants, FIFA and the AFC will continue to work together to closely monitor the situation in the region and to identify new dates for the respective qualifying matches. Further details on the new dates for the next round of qualifying matches for the FIFA World Cup 2022 and Asian Cup 2023 will be announced in due course.”
For every FIFA World Cup, all the six confederations organize qualifier games and from those qualifier games 34 teams get selected and they compete for the FIFA World Cup trophy.
If we look at the slot distributions amongst the confederations: AFC (Asia) has 4 or 5 slots, CAF(Africa) has 5 slots, CONCACAF (North, Central America and the Caribbean) has 3 or 4 slots, CONMEBOL (South America) has 4 or 5 slots, OFC (Oceania) has 0 or 1 slots and UEFA (Europe) has the most 13 slots with them.
And one slot is given to the host country which is Qatar for the 2022 World Cup. For the first time after 1930 and 1934, the World Cup will be hosted by a country whose national team has never played a finals match before.
