The AFC second round of

2022 FIFA World Cup qualification The 2022 FIFA World Cup qualification was the FIFA World Cup qualification, qualifying process which decided the 31 teams that would join hosts Qatar national football team, Qatar, who received an automatic spot, at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Par ...

, which also served as the second round of 2023 AFC Asian Cup qualification, was played from 5 September 2019 to 15 June 2021.

Format

A total of forty teams were drawn into eight groups of five to play home-and-away round-robin matches. They included the 34 teams (teams ranked 1–34 in the AFC entrant list) which received byes to this round, and the six winners from the

first round First most commonly refers to: * First, the ordinal form of the number 1 First or 1st may also refer to: Acronyms * Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters, an astronomical survey carried out by the Very Large Array * Far Infrared a ...

. Seven group winners (excluding Qatar, who had already qualified to the World Cup as tournament hosts) and the five best runners-up advanced to the third round. Matches in this round were also part of the 2023 AFC Asian Cup qualifying campaign. The twelve teams which advanced to the third round of the FIFA World Cup qualification and Qatar, as group winners, automatically qualified for the

2023 AFC Asian Cup The 2023 AFC Asian Cup was the 18th edition of the AFC Asian Cup, the quadrennial international Association football, football tournament organised by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). It involved 24 national teams after its expansion in 20 ...

. Twenty-four teams (22 of which advanced directly and two which advanced from an additional play-off round) played in the

third round Third or 3rd may refer to: Numbers * 3rd, the ordinal form of the cardinal number 3 * , a fraction of one third * 1⁄60 of a ''second'', i.e., the third in a series of fractional parts in a sexagesimal number system Places * 3rd Street (di ...

of the AFC Asian Cup qualification to decide the remaining eleven teams. In total, the 2023 AFC Asian Cup featured 24 teams.

Seeding

The draw for the second round was held on 17 July 2019 at 17:00 MST (

UTC+8 UTC+08:00 is an identifier for a time offset from UTC of +08:00. It is the most populous time zone in the world, as well as a possible candidate for ASEAN Common Time, mainly due to China's large population, with an estimated population ...

), at the AFC House in

Kuala Lumpur Kuala Lumpur (KL), officially the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, is the capital city and a Federal Territories of Malaysia, federal territory of Malaysia. It is the largest city in the country, covering an area of with a census population ...

, Malaysia. The seeding was based on the

FIFA World Rankings The FIFA Men's World Ranking is a ranking system for men's national teams in association football, first introduced in December 1992. The men's teams of the member nations of FIFA, football's world governing body, are ranked based on their gam ...

of June 2019 (shown in parentheses below). Note: Bolded teams qualified for the

. ^†

First round First most commonly refers to: * First, the ordinal form of the number 1 First or 1st may also refer to: Acronyms * Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters, an astronomical survey carried out by the Very Large Array * Far Infrared a ...

winners
^W Withdrew after five matches

Schedule

The schedule of each matchday was as follows. On 5 March 2020, FIFA announced that it would be monitoring the health situation in the region for possible rescheduling of matchdays 7 through 10 due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. Later on 9 March, FIFA and AFC jointly announced that the matches on matchdays 7–10 due to take place in March and June 2020 were postponed, with the new dates to be confirmed. However, subject to approval by FIFA and AFC, and agreement of both member associations, the matches may be played as scheduled provided that all individuals' safety meets the required standards. On 5 June, AFC confirmed that matchdays 7 and 8 were scheduled to take place on 8 and 13 October respectively while matchdays 9 and 10 were scheduled to kick off on 12 and 17 November. On 12 August, FIFA announced that the matches scheduled for October and November 2020 would be rescheduled to 2021. On 11 November 2020, the AFC Competitions Committee agreed at its third meeting that all second-round matches should be completed by 15 June 2021 with matchdays 7 and 8 in March and 9 and 10 in June. On the same day, however, FIFA, along with the Bangladeshi and Qatari associations, approved the only second-round match originally scheduled for 2020, Qatar versus Bangladesh, which was played on 4 December. On 19 February 2021, FIFA and AFC postponed most of the upcoming matches to June. Note: The group spots of Qatar and Bangladesh were swapped due to Qatar's planned participation in the 2020 Copa América, which was later deferred (becoming the

2021 Copa América The 2021 Copa América was the 47th edition of the Copa América, the international men's association football, football championship organised by South America's football ruling body CONMEBOL. The tournament took place in Brazil from 13 June to ...

). Qatar eventually withdrew.

Centralised venues

On 12 March 2021, AFC confirmed the hosts for the group stage scheduled to take place from 31 May to 15 June. *Group A: United Arab Emirates (China hosted Guam on 28 May.) *Group B: Kuwait *Group C: Bahrain *Group D: Saudi Arabia *Group E: Qatar *Group F: Japan *Group G: United Arab Emirates *Group H: South Korea In general, these hosts were the seeded (Pot 1) teams from each group. The exceptions were Group A (where United Arab Emirates took over hosting duties after China could not host due to COVID-19 restrictions), Group B (where Pot 4 team Kuwait hosted rather than Australia), and Group C (where Pot 3 team Bahrain hosted rather than Iran).

Group A

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Group B

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Group C

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Group D

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Group E

The group spots of Qatar and Bangladesh were swapped due to Qatar's planned participation in the 2020 Copa América. The tournament was later deferred (becoming the

), and eventually Qatar withdrew from it. ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Goalscorers

Group F

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Group G

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Group H

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Ranking of runner-up teams

Group H contained only four teams compared to five teams in all other groups after North Korea withdrew. Therefore, the results against the fifth-placed team were not counted when determining the ranking of the runner-up teams.

Ranking of fifth-placed teams

Notes

References

External links

*
Qualifiers – Asia Matches: Round 2
FIFA.com

the-AFC.com

the-AFC.com
Preliminary Joint Qualification 2022
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