Ghana’s path to the 2022 FIFA World Cup will be made clearer when the draw for the qualifiers are held on Monday, 29 July, 2019.
The Confederation of African Football will conduct the draw for the eliminators in Cairo.
The Black Stars and 25 other top-ranked teams on the continent will not take part in a preliminary qualifying stage but they will know their opponents for the second round of the qualifiers which is the group stage.
The Format:
The first round will see 28 of the continent’s lowest-ranked sides being drawn against each other for a two-leg home and away tie.
The 28 teams for the first round will be made up of:
Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Seychelles, Sao Tome, Chad, South Sudan, Gambia, Mauritius, Liberia, Ethiopia, Comoros, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Togo, Malawi, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Namibia, Central African Republic and Tanzania.
The winners will then progress to the next stage to join the top ranked teams on the continent, 26 of them, including Ghana’s Black Stars currently ranked and complete the list of 40 teams, and who have been drawn into 10 groups of four each.
Some of the top-ranked teams are runners up at the recently held Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), Senegal who maintained their first place in Africa and ranked 20th in the world, Tunisia who finished fourth at the AFCON and ranked 29th in the world.
Nigeria (33rd), newly-crowned African champions, Algeria (40th), Morocco (41st), Egypt (49th), Cameroun (53rd), DR Congo (56th) and Cote d’Ivoire (57th), Mali (59th) in that order, complete the top 10.
The winners of the second round will advance to the third and final round where they will again be drawn to face each other in a home and away tie with the winners eventually picking the five slots alloted to Africa for the 2022 Games set be hosted in the Arab world for the first time.