What are the rules for the Asian qualifiers of the 20 14 World Cup?

201April 16, at the meeting of the AFC executive Committee, the new competition system of Russia's 20 18 Asian World Cup was formally adopted. The biggest change is that in the past, the top ten in the final stage of Asian regional qualifiers will become 12, so that there will be no team bye in every round and the game will become more fair. In addition, the number of teams participating in the final stage of the 20 19 Asian Cup will be increased from 16 to 24, and the qualifiers for the second half of the World Cup in Russia will be merged with those for the 20 19 Asian Cup.

According to the latest competition system, the Asian preliminaries of the 20 18 World Cup in Russia will be divided into three stages.

The first stage: AFC teams ranked lower in the world will qualify according to the home and away games;

The second stage: it consists of the winning team in the first stage of qualifying and 40 teams that did not participate in qualifying. It was divided into 8 groups, with 5 teams in each group playing in the top 40, and the first place in each group and the second place in the four best teams advanced to the third stage 12.

The third stage: 65,438+02 teams are divided into two groups to play home and away games. The first two teams directly advanced to the final stage of the World Cup in Russia, and the two teams decided to take the third place to compete for another World Cup place with other continents.