The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) will allocate the seeds for the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, based on the FIFA rankings just before the draw takes place.
Specifically, the draw for the 2026 World Cup qualifiers in Asia will take place in July, meaning the FIFA rankings right after the FIFA Days (the day the World Football Federation allows teams to gather players from clubs and do international duty) at the end of June will play a decisive role in the seeding groups of the teams.
Will Vietnam and Thailand meet again in the 2026 World Cup qualifiers? (Photo: Tien Tuan).
Because the second qualifying round of the 2026 World Cup in Asia has 9 groups (while the 2023 Asian Cup only has 6 groups), the Vietnamese team may be in a higher seed group in the World Cup qualifying round, compared to the seed group we currently have in the 2023 Asian Cup.
AFC will divide 4 seed groups into 9 qualifying groups, each seed group has 9 teams. Currently, Vietnam team is ranked 95th in the world and 16th in Asia. This ranking will not change much in the FIFA Days match in June. We are currently in the same seed group number 2 with Uzbekistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Bahrain, China, Syria, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan.
Pot one seeds include Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, South Korea, Qatar, Iraq, Oman and UAE.
Meanwhile, Thailand is in the third seed group, along with North Korea, India, the Philippines, Turkmenistan, Malaysia, Tajikistan and the two highest-ranked teams from the play-off round of the first qualifying round of the 2026 World Cup in Asia.
In the near future, the two youth teams U22 Vietnam and U22 Thailand will face each other at the SEA Games (Photo: Tuan Duy).
Group 4 includes the remaining teams that passed the play-off series of the first qualifying round mentioned above.
In addition to being based on seeding, the division of the World Cup qualifying groups in Asia also takes into account geographical factors, helping teams to travel as little as possible. For example, teams from the same geographical region but from different seeding groups can be grouped together.
With this division, it is not impossible that the Vietnamese and Thai teams will continue to clash in the second qualifying round of the 2026 World Cup in Asia.
In the most recent World Cup qualifiers of 2018 and 2022, the Vietnamese team was in the same group with Thailand in the second qualifying round. In fact, in the second qualifying round of the 2022 World Cup in Asia, the Vietnamese team's group included 4 Southeast Asian teams: In addition to Coach Park Hang Seo's team, there were also Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia (the remaining team in the group was the UAE).
The second round of the 2026 World Cup qualifiers in Asia will begin in November this year and last until June 2024. Before that, the play-off matches of the first qualifying round will take place in October.
Source
Comment (0)