Egypt’s football team has advanced nine places this July to rank 49th on Thursday according to the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) July rankings.
Egypt ranked sixth among the African teams after earning 47 points in the July rankings.
Senegal leads the African teams standing in 20th place worldwide while the champion of the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) Algeria jumped 38 places to rank 40th worldwide and fourth among the African countries.
The top ten African teams were Senegal (20th), Tunisia (29th), Nigeria (33rd), Algeria (40th), Morocco (41st), Egypt (49th), Ghana (50th), Cameroon (53rd), Democratic Republic of the Congo (56th), and Côte d’Ivoire (57th).
The draw for the 2022 World Cup will be held on Monday at the African Union headquarters in Cairo. Egypt will start ranked at the top of the playing group during the second phase of the 2022 World Cup qualifiers.
CAF announced a new system for World Cup qualification. The system exempts the 26 highest-ranking FIFA teams from playing in the preliminary qualifiers, leaving 28 national teams to compete for qualification. Of the 28 teams, the 14 highest-ranking FIFA teams will play against the lowest-ranking teams. During this first leg, the lowest-ranking FIFA teams will play at home.
The second round of qualifiers is the group stage, in which the 14 teams that qualified during the preliminary round will join the exempted 26 teams. The 40 teams will be divided into 10 groups of four teams.
The 40 teams will be divided into four levels according to the FIFA ranking. Each of the 10 groups will include a team from each level.
The third phase is the knockout stage in which the ten winning teams from the group stage will be divided into two levels according to their FIFA rankings. The five highest-ranking teams will play against the five lowest-ranking teams, with lowest-ranking teams playing at home.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
