| The match schedule was unveiled on 6 June 2021 | The teams that won qualification matches 1, 2 and 3 occupied positions 2, 3 and 4 in pot 3, and the remaining teams were placed in pot 4 in order |
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| Countries were not UAFA members Of the 23 participating teams, the top nine teams based on the April 2021 directly qualified to the group stage, while the remaining 14 teams played seven single-leg matches, with seven teams going through to the group stage | The 14 teams in the qualifiers were paired based on their April 2021 FIFA ranking: the highest-ranked team in the qualifiers, , played against the lowest-ranked team, |
The 16 teams were drawn into four groups of four.
7| The 39 matches will be played in six venues, which will also be used for the 2022 FIFA World Cup | It was conducted by Manolo Zubiria, FIFA's director of competitions, and four former players: Egypt , Saudi Arabia , Sudan and Iraq |
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| The was later included as a venue for the Group D matches due to the poor condition of | In the group stage, there will be four groups of four teams in a , with the top two teams from each group qualifying to the knockout stage, which will consist of quarter-finals, semi-finals, a play-off for third place, and the final |
The hosts were automatically seeded into pot 1 and assigned to position A1, while the remaining automatically qualified teams were seeded into their respective pots based on the of April 2021 shown in parentheses below.
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