The 2025 Africa Cup of Nations qualification matches are organised by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) to decide the participating teams of the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco, the 35th edition of the international men's football championship of Africa. The qualification began with the preliminary round which ran from 20 to 26 March 2024 and will conclude with the group stage, which will be played in September, October and November, all in 2024. A total of 24 teams will qualify to play in the final tournament, including automatically-qualified hosts Morocco.
Entrants
All CAF member associations entered the competition, except Eritrea and Seychelles, who were excluded from the qualifiers. The seeding was based on the FIFA World Ranking from 15 February 2024, with teams ranked 1st to 44th received a bye to the qualifying group stage, while the teams ranked 45th to 52nd had to participate in the preliminary round.[1]
The preliminary round draw was held on 20 February 2024, 14:00 CAT (UTC+2) at the CAF headquarters in Cairo, Egypt.[2]
For the first time since their suspensions, Kenya and Zimbabwe made their phased returns to the qualifying stage.
The group stage draw took place on 4 July 2024 at 2:30 pm (UTC+2) in Johannesburg, South Africa. The 48 national teams involved were divided into twelve groups of four each, which consisted of the 44 teams that entered directly, in addition to the four winners of the preliminary round, and were seeded into four pots of twelve each based on the June 2024 FIFA World Rankings (shown in parentheses).[5][6]
The teams are ranked according to points (3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 points for a loss). If tied on points, tiebreakers are applied in the following order (Regulations Article 14):
Goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
Away goals scored in head-to-head matches among tied teams;
If more than two teams are tied, and after applying all head-to-head criteria above, a subset of teams are still tied, all head-to-head criteria above will be reapplied exclusively to this subset of teams;
Updated to match(es) played on 26 October 2024. Source: CAF Notes:
^Nigeria were awarded a 3–0 win following an incident upon their arrival in Libya, where they were stranded at the airport for over 12 hours, before ultimately refusing to play and pulling out.[7]
There have been 224 goals scored in 103 matches, for an average of 2.17 goals per match (as of 15 October 2024). Players highlighted in bold are still active in the competition.
