The Oceania Football Confederation’s (OFC) 11 members will discover the start of the road that could lead to them being one of the 48 teams at the most inclusive FIFA World Cup™ ever when their preliminary qualifying draw for the FIFA World Cup 26™ takes place on Thursday, 18 July 2024. France’s FIFA World Cup 98™ winner and FIFA Legend Christian Karembeu, who was born in New Caledonia, will assist Dame Sarai Bareman, FIFA’s Chief Women’s Football Officer, with the draw held at the Home of FIFA in Zurich, Switzerland, at 9am CEST (7am GMT/7pm NZST). The draw can be watched live on FIFA.com and FIFA+ HERE. Based on the FIFA/Coca-Cola Men's World Ranking of July 2024, the four lowest-ranked teams – Samoa, Cook Islands, American Samoa and Tonga – will compete in round one’s knockout-match format in September 2024 to decide which of the quartet joins the seven highest-ranked sides in the second round. The draw will see those eight countries split across three pots, and they will then be drawn into two groups of four. The draw will commence with Pot 3 working through to Pot 1. Each country will play every opponent in the group once in matches staged in October and November 2024 with the top two teams from each group progressing to round three. In March 2025, they will meet in semi-final ties (Group A winners vs Group B runners-up, Group B winners vs Group A runners-up). The victors of those matches will then go head-to-head for the first-ever guaranteed ticket to a FIFA World Cup for an OFC nation. All the matches of the OFC qualification phase to FIFA World Cup 26 will be broadcast worldwide on FIFA+ starting from September 2024. The runner-up in that contest will progress to the FIFA Intercontinental Play-off Tournament where victory would give Oceania an historic second FIFA World Cup representative in Canada, Mexico and the United States in 2026. Pot allocations for the second preliminary round draw Pot 1 New Zealand Solomon Islands Pot 2 Fiji Tahiti New Caledonia Vanuatu Pot 3 Papua New Guinea Winner round one