The Oceania Preliminary Qualifying draw for the FIFA World Cup 26™ has been held at FIFA HQ in Zurich, Switzerland.
The Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) 11 full member nations have discovered the road to becoming one of the 48 teams at the most inclusive FIFA World Cup™ ever.
Based on the men’s FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking ™ of July 2024, the four lowest-ranked teams – Samoa, Cook Islands, American Samoa, and Tonga – will compete in round one’s knockout-match format in September in Apia.
The winners will meet three days later to determine which team progresses to the Group stage.
New Zealand, which represented Oceania at the 1982 and 2010 FIFA World Cups™, has been drawn in Group B alongside Tahiti, Vanuatu, and the round one winner.
The Solomon Islands are the top-ranked team in Group A and will play Fiji, New Caledonia, and Papua New Guinea. The top two teams from each group will play every opponent once in matches staged in October and November.
The victors of those matches will then compete for the first-ever guaranteed ticket to a FIFA World Cup™ for an OFC nation.
The runner-up in that contest will progress to the FIFA Intercontinental Play-off Tournament, giving Oceania a chance to become a historic second FIFA World Cup™ representative in Canada, Mexico, and the United States in 2026.
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