By Mark Gleeson
CAPE TOWN (Reuters) -African fans will need their calculators over the next week of World Cup qualifiers to figure out if their favoured team remains in contention for a place at next year’s finals in North America.
The nine group winners all qualify automatically and will be determined when the group qualifying programme ends on Tuesday.
While that is simple enough, there is the possibility of an additional 10th African team reaching next June’s finals in Canada, Mexico and the United States via a lengthy playoff route.
The four best runners-up from the nine groups will go into a playoff next month to determine a sole African representative for a further intercontinental playoff planned for March.
Calculating the four best runners-up from the nine African groups would have been easy had Eritrea not withdrawn before the start of the campaign, but after the draw was made, and left one of the groups with five teams instead of six.
Therefore, because the five countries in Group E played eight qualifiers instead of 10 in all the other groups, the four best runners-up will be determined not by their overall points tally but by their results only against the third, fourth and fifth-placed sides in their respective groups.
In other words, any points that the runners-up accumulated in matches against the last-placed finisher are expunged, the Confederation of African Football has confirmed.
The penultimate round of qualifiers began on Wednesday and with two rounds to play, there are only two confirmed group winners, no confirmed runners-up and four teams condemned to last place.
Morocco and Tunisia last month secured top place in their respective groups, and a ticket to the 2026 World Cup, while Djibouti (Group A), Seychelles (F), Somalia (G) and Sao Tome and Principe (H) will finish last.
Effectively, the identity of the best four runners-up will only be determined when the last group matches are concluded on Tuesday, and even then the calculators will be needed to see who heads to the playoffs.
Some of the continent’s heavyweights, and former World Cup finalists, like Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, look likely to miss out on automatic qualification, so will be particularly anxious to see if they can keep their World Cup hopes alive via the playoffs.
(Editing by Christian Radnedge)
