Africa changes qualification plans for soccer World Cup

Africa has changed its qualification plans for the 2006 World Cup today, scrapping an earlier decision to use the African Nations Cup finals of the same year as an eliminator for Germany.

The ruling by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in Cairo means that the winners of the five World Cup qualifying groups will reach the finals rather than the top four finishers at the Nations Cup plus a fifth country.

The World Cup qualifiers will also be used to determine which 16 teams reach the Nations Cup finals in Egypt in 2006, CAF said.

Sources within CAF said many African nations realised they would lose out on much-needed television and marketing revenues if World Cup qualifiers were abolished as had been originally agreed in January this year.

A Tunisian proposal for two rounds of qualifiers was accepted and will now be put to FIFA's World Cup organising committee, which meets in Madrid next week.

The new procedure will allow 16 countries to get into the second round of the qualifiers, leaving Africa's other 36 members to play preliminary round play-offs. The 18 winners of those and the 16 seeded sides will then be divided into five groups of six and play a round-robin competition.

The group winners qualify for both the World Cup and the Nations Cup and the group runners-up and third place finishers will also proceed to the Nations Cup. CAF officials said they might still make minor modifications to the process but the general principle was accepted as a fairer qualifying procedure.

The leaders of four of Africa's participants at this year's World Cup, Cameroon, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia, attended today's meeting and supported the change. Nigeria were also invited but did not send a representative. The decision follows a similar meeting yesterday which proposed drastic changes to the three annual African club competitions as CAF seeks to better exploit the possibility of television and marketing revenue.

The African Champions League is to be expanded in 2004 and the African Cup Winners' Cup and the CAF Cup combined into a single new tournament, as was recently also done in Europe.