24 teams participate in the 2023 Asian Cup Qualifiers Group Draw on 2.24 next year

According to sources from the AFC, the third stage of the 2023 Asian Cup qualifiers is scheduled for a group draw ceremony at the AFC headquarters in Kuala Lumpur on February 24 next year. The 24 teams will split into 6 groups to compete for the remaining 11 tickets.

The second stage of the 2023 Asian Cup Qualifiers is the Qatar World Preliminary Round of 40 that ended in the first half of this year, and the 12 teams that qualified for the 12 rounds also won the tickets for the Asian Cup, of which the Chinese team has automatically obtained the ticket because it is the host of the 2023 Asian Cup, and the Qatar team has also obtained the ticket because it won the first place in the group in the Top 40, so a total of 13 teams have qualified for the final stage competition. The remaining 11 teams are contested by the remaining teams participating in the Round of 40.

Affected by the epidemic, the AFC has previously changed the competition method of the third stage of the Asian Cup qualifiers, changing the original home and away system to a centralized competition system, deciding the group ranking in a single round-robin manner, and the match time is also arranged for three rounds of matches on June 8, 11 and 14, 2022. It is precisely because of this that the group lottery ceremony originally scheduled for October this year has been postponed. According to the latest arrangements of the AFC, the group draw ceremony for the qualifiers is scheduled for February 24 next year. At that time, the 24 teams participating in the qualifiers will be divided into four classes based on the latest world rankings of national and regional national teams announced by FIFA in February next year, with one team drawn from each class and six different groups.

According to the current FIFA latest rankings, the classification situation is roughly as follows:

First tier: Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Palestine, India;

Second tier: Tajik, Thailand, Philippines, Turkmen, Kuwait, Hong Kong;

Third tier: Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen, Malaysia, Maldives, Singapore;

Fourth tier: Indonesia, Nepal, Cambodia, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka.

With the Southeast Asian Championship currently in Singapore, which will not end until January 1 next year, the rankings of the Southeast Asian teams will certainly change. Moreover, there will also be a FIFA designated national team match window from the end of January to early February next year, when the teams will also arrange warm-up matches, so the FIFA rankings of each team are likely to change, and the final classification situation is waiting for FIFA to announce the latest ranking in mid-February next year.

(Source: Sports Weekly)