FIFA World Cup 2022 is being held in Qatar for the first time in history. And as a host it automatically qualified for the tournament. After becoming the host of the FIFA tournament, Qatar has grabbed everyone’s attention. Everyone has their eyes on the Arab country as they are curious to see what magic it sprinkles in the FIFA World Cup.
Is it going to be the best world cup or the worst? And most importantly regarding participation, is Qatar going to play in the FIFA World Cup in Qatar? Did Qatar qualify for FIFA World Cup 2022? In this article you would get to know answers to all of these questions.
FIFA World Cup 2022
FIFA World Cup 2022 will see a total of 32 teams in Qatar competing against each other for the World Football Championship. FIFA has selected Qatar to host the World Cup 2022. The tournament is scheduled to be held from November 20, 2022 to December 18, 2022.
This tournament will run for 29 days and consist of 64 matches. All the 64 matches will be played in eight different venues of Qatar. Players like Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo and Neymar Jr shall also mark their presence representing their home countries.
The Qatar World Cup is going to be the 22nd football World Cup as FIFA introduced the concept of this competition less than a century earlier and the first FIFA World Cup was held in 1930 in Uruguay. At that time only a few countries participated in the tournament but as time passed, more and more nations joined the race to become World Football champion.
FIFA World Cup 2022 Qualification
FIFA always follows a long and active qualification process to decide who shows up in the World’s largest Football competition. The World Cup is organised only once in four years and that’s why every Nation is ready to stake everything just to qualify for the tournament. Same procedure was followed for the FIFA World Cup 2022. Though the Qualifications suffered numerous postponements due to Covid 19 pandemic, it finally took place in the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022.
FIFA had to decide 31 countries who could join the hosting nation, Qatar in the World Cup who automatically received a spot in the World Cup.
All FIFA member associations were eligible to enter Qualification. Qatar was one of them but fortunately it didn’t compete in qualification as it automatically got qualified as a hosting nation.
World Cup teams selection was based on the equal regional representation in which all six regions were allotted a fixed number of seats for the tournament. Each confederation organised and held Qualification on their continental level and after selecting final qualifiers they handed the rest over to the FIFA.
Qatar automatically qualified for the world Cup 2022 as hosting nation. It didn’t need to go through the whole Qualification process to join the other 31 nations in the tournament. It was declared on December 2, 2010 that Qatar would be hosting the event in 2022. Well, Qatar is a FIFA member associated with Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
Though Qatar didn’t have to enter Qualification for participating in FIFA World Cup, it participated in the Asian qualifying stage where first two rounds acted as it’s qualification for the 2023 AFC Asian Cup. Due to a small time gap between both tournaments, AFC managed to hold joint Qualification for them.
Qatar along with other qualified participants was supposed to submit its final 26-men squad to FIFA by November 14 while some countries were advanced enough to do it before the deadline. By November 15, FIFA approved and finalised the squads for all 32 teams.
Qatar also got the opportunity to play the opening match against Ecuador as an advantage of the tournament being held on its own soil. In the initial days or group stage of the tournament, Qatar will play in Group A that includes Senegal, Ecuador and Netherlands.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Qatar manages both the responsibilities, playing and hosting. Well, one thing is clear that Qatar has prepared a long way as seven of its hosting stadiums are newly built keeping FIFA World Cup in mind specially.
Who will join Qatar in the FIFA World Cup 2022?
32 teams which are going to play in the 2022 World Cup have been selected from different regions. 13 qualified Nations for the 2022 World Cup are from Europe, four from Asia, four from South America, 5 from Africa and the last 4 teams have been qualified from North America and Australia, a member of the Asian confederation. But the most important thing is which 32 teams qualify for the upcoming next world cup.
As I told you before, only 32 countries qualify for a world cup. Same rule is imposed on the upcoming 2022 World Cup. 32 nations selected for the tournament represent different regions. This list of Nations include Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, Denmark, Belgium, Croatia, France, Serbia, Spain, England, Netherlands, Argentina, IR Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, Canada, Uruguay, Ecuador, Canada, Ghana, Senegal, Poland, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia, United States, Cameroon, Wales and Mexico.
Schedule
The Qatar World Cup is scheduled to be played from November 20 to December December 18. The tournament is divided into two phases – group phase and knockout phase. The group phase will run from November 20 to December 2 where the above mentioned groups will compete with each other. On the other hand, the knockout phase will run from December 2 to 18. On December 18, the finale of the tournament will take place which is also a special day for the hosting Country. It’s Qatar National Day on December 18.
World Cup Venues
Everybody knows that the FIFA World Cup 2022 is going to be held in Qatar but not everyone knows in which stadiums they have to mark their attendance in order to watch their favorite teams and players playing football on the international level. The tournament will go on for around a month and a total of 64 matches will be played across eight different venues. The stadiums are as follows:
