Qualification for the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations began with the preliminary round which ran from 21 to 26 March and will conclude with the group stage, which will be played in September and November, all in 2024. A total of 24 teams will qualify to play in the final tournament, including automatically-qualified hosts Morocco.
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]
The date for the group stage's draw is yet to be announced by CAF. The 48 national teams involved will be divided into twelve groups of four each (from Group A to Group L), which will consist of the 44 teams that entered directly, in addition to the four winners of the preliminary round. The 48 national teams will be seeded into four pots of twelve each based on the most recent FIFA World Rankings (shown in parentheses) before the draw.
The following is a provisional seeding based on the FIFA World Rankings from April 2024, and may not represent the final seeding that will be used by CAF.[5]
The teams were ranked according to points (3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 points for a loss). If tied on points, tiebreakers were 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 were tied, and after applying all head-to-head criteria above, a subset of teams were still tied, all head-to-head criteria above was reapplied exclusively to this subset of teams;
There have been 15 goals scored in 15 matches, for an average of 1 goal per match (as of 26 March 2024). Players highlighted in bold are still active in the competition.
Notes: The 2021 and 2023 tournaments were actually held in 2022 and 2024 respectively. • There were no 1957 and 1959 qualifications as places were given by invitation only. • The "finals" articles for 1959 and 1976 are about the decisive matches of final group stages. Football in Africa portal
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Eswatini 
South Sudan 
Mauritius 
Liberia 
TBD 
Morocco
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