Officials to draw teams for 2018 World Cup qualifiers

(CNS): The draw to determine who will play who in the region during the first games on the road to the 2018 World Cup in Russia will take place in Miami Thursday. The draw includes 27 of the 35 national teams making up the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF), including the Cayman Islands. The match-ups will be for the first two rounds of the five-round regional qualifying tournament in CONCACAF, which begins in March and runs through 2017.

The seeding for the draw is based on the FIFA rankings from August last year and Cayman, ranked at number 33, will be in the bottom fourteen, along with St. Kitts & Nevis, Belize, Montserrat, Dominica, Barbados, Bermuda, Nicaragua, Turks & Caicos, Curacao, US Virgin Islands, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands and Anguilla. These teams will play Round One of the Preliminary Competition in a series of seven home-and-away games in March.

For Round Two, the thirteen teams seeded 9-21, which are Canada, Cuba, Aruba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Suriname, Guatemala, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Grenada, Antigua & Barbuda, Guyana and Puerto Rico, will play a ten home-and-away series in June.

In August and September the top ten teams from those two rounds will be matched up against each other and the Caribbean’s leading two national squads, Jamaica and Haiti. The top six seeds will then join the competition in Round 4, which consists of three groups of four teams and is scheduled to be played in a round-robin format between November 2015 and September 2016.

The now-famed CONCACAF Hexagonal will constitute Round Five. Continuing in its six-team format, the top two teams from each Round Four group and will play between November 2016 and October 2017, with three CONCACAF nations going directly to the FIFA World Cup and providing a further intercontinental playoff spot for the fourth-placed team.

The match-ups and groupings for Rounds Three, Four and Five of CONCACAF World Cup qualifying will be determined at the FIFA World Cup Qualifying Draw in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 25 July 2015.