The Oceania Football Confederation’s (OFC) 11 members will embark on their journey to potentially become one of the 48 teams at the most inclusive FIFA World Cup ever, as their preliminary qualifying draw takes place on Thursday, 18 July 2024.
France’s FIFA World Cup 98 winner and FIFA Legend Christian Karembeu, who hails from New Caledonia, will join Dame Sarai Bareman, FIFA’s Chief Women’s Football Officer, to conduct the draw at the Home of FIFA in Zurich, Switzerland, at 9am CEST (7am GMT/7pm NZST).
According to the FIFA/Coca-Cola Men’s World Ranking of July 2024, the four lowest-ranked teams – Samoa, Cook Islands, American Samoa, and Tonga – will compete in a knockout-match format in September 2024. The winner will join the seven highest-ranked teams in the second round.
The draw will place these eight nations into three pots, and they will then be allocated into two groups of four. The drawing will start with Pot 3 and proceed to Pot 1.
Each team will face every opponent in their group once in matches scheduled for October and November 2024. The top two squads from each group will advance to the third round.
In March 2025, these teams will compete in semi-final matches (Group A winners vs Group B runners-up and Group B winners vs Group A runners-up). The winners will then clash for the first-ever guaranteed spot for an OFC nation in a FIFA World Cup.
All OFC qualification matches for FIFA World Cup 2026 will be broadcast worldwide on FIFA+ beginning in September 2024.
The runner-up will have a chance to compete in the FIFA Intercontinental Play-off Tournament, where a win would grant Oceania a historic second FIFA World Cup representative in Canada, Mexico, and the United States in 2026.
Pot allocations for the second preliminary round draw:
Pot 1
New Zealand
Solomon Islands
Pot 2
Fiji
Tahiti
New Caledonia
Vanuatu
Pot 3
Papua New Guinea
Winner of round one