Rules for Asian regional qualifiers of the 26th World Cup.
The first stage of the qualifying round: teams ranked 26th to 47th in the AFC Champions League will participate, and 1 1 teams will be selected to advance to the second stage.
Top 36 in the second stage: 1 1 teams selected in the first stage and the top 25 teams in the AFC Champions League form the top 36, and they are divided into 9 groups to compete. The top two in the group directly advanced to the third stage and qualified for the 2027 Asian Cup.
18 third stage: The 18 teams that advanced in the second stage were divided into three groups, and the top two teams in each group (***6 teams) directly advanced to the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
The fourth stage play-off: In the third stage, the third and fourth players of each team (6 teams in total) are divided into two groups to fight a duel based on the championship (single round duel).
correlation analysis
In the third stage, the first group directly enters the World Cup, and then the last two groups play a play-off, and the winner gets 0.5 places needed to play the intercontinental play-off. In the top 36, * * * is divided into nine groups, which means there will be nine seed teams. Taking the current ranking as a reference, this means that we will only meet one of the top nine teams in the AFC, such as Iran, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates and Oman.
In the 18 match, they were divided into three groups, although the top two in each group directly advanced to the World Cup. However, this difficulty is a little lower than the previous 12 tournament. The top two players in the national football team are unrealistic, but the third and fourth players can still advance to the play-offs. Therefore, as long as the national football team guarantees that the score is not lower than the third from the bottom, it will not die.