2025/26 Concacaf W Qualifiers: Official Draw and Competition Details  | OneFootball

Miami, FL – Concacaf has today confirmed key details for the 2025/26 Concacaf W Qualifiers, which will feature 30 Member Associations and serve as the preliminary stage of the 2026 Concacaf W Championship—the first of three major centralized tournaments in the revamped Concacaf women’s national team calendar, announced in September.

Building on the success of the inaugural Concacaf W Gold Cup and the W Champions Cup, the Confederation took another significant step in advancing the growth and development of women’s football by introducing an expanded and revamped women’s national team calendar for the 2025–2029 international cycle.

The Concacaf W ecosystem now includes the W Qualifiers and W Championship, serving as the qualification path to the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, the inaugural Concacaf W Nations League, and a second edition of the W Gold Cup.

Together with the Concacaf W Champions Cup, an annual tournament for the Confederation’s best women’s clubs, these competitions will provide Member Associations with a consistent and competitive calendar, ensuring regular opportunities for their teams to compete on both regional and global stages.

For more information on Concacaf’s 2025–2029 women’s national team calendar, click here.

2025-26 CONCACAF W QUALIFIERS COMPETITION FORMAT AND DATES

The 2025–26 Concacaf W Qualifiers will include 30 Member Associations and take place during the FIFA Women’s International Match Windows in November 2025, and February and April 2026.

For these qualifiers, which will not include the region’s two top-ranked nations according to the Concacaf Women's Rankings (they have received a bye to the W Championship), participating teams will be split into six groups for Group Stage play.

During the Group Stage, each team will play two matches at home and two away. At the conclusion of this round, the six group winners will advance to the Concacaf W Championship.

The 30 nations confirmed to participate in the 2025–26 Concacaf W Qualifiers are, in alphabetical order: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Cuba, Curacao, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, US Virgin Islands.

The two teams that have received a bye to the 2026 Concacaf W Championship are, in ranking order: the United States and Canada.

2025-26 CONCACAF W QUALIFIERS DRAW DETAILS

On Wednesday, August 20, Concacaf will conduct the official draw for the 2025–26 W Qualifiers. Fans can follow the made-for-TV event live on the Concacaf YouTube channel, beginning at 7:00 p.m. ET.

The event will be executed using a single-blind system and four pots. Based on the Concacaf Women’s Senior National Team Rankings, the participating nations have been ranked from 1 to 30 and either pre-seeded into a group or placed into one of four pots, as follows:

The draw will begin by confirming the group assignments for the six pre-seeded nations, with the highest-ranked team assigned to Group A and the lowest-ranked team assigned to Group F.

Following this, the draw will proceed with Pot 1. The first team drawn from Pot 1 will be placed in Group A (position A2), the second in Group B (position B2), the third in Group C (position C2), the fourth in Group D (position D2), the fifth in Group E (position E2), and the sixth in Group F (position F2). The same process will be repeated for Pots 2, 3, and 4, sequentially assigning teams to Groups A through F.

At the conclusion of the draw, each group will consist of five teams: one pre-seeded team and one team from each of the four pots.

The match schedule for the W 2025-2026 W Qualifiers will be announced after the draw.

2026 Concacaf W Championship

The W Championship will be played in November 2026 and will serve as the Confederation’s qualifier for the FIFA Women’s World Cup Brazil 2027 and the 2028 LA Summer Olympics.

The eight teams participating in the five-round direct elimination knockout-style competition will include the region’s two top-ranked teams (United States and Canada) and the six group winners of the 2025-2026 Concacaf W Qualifiers.

The competition will begin with the Quarterfinals, followed by a Play-In, Semifinals, Third-Place Match, and Final. To determine the Quarterfinal pairings and each team's path to the Final, Concacaf will rank teams 1-8, with the highest-ranked team facing the lowest-ranked team.

At the conclusion of the Quarterfinals, the four matchup winners will qualify for the Semifinals and guarantee their place in the FIFA Women’s World Cup Brazil 2027, while the four losers will progress to a Play-In, from where the 2 winning teams will each battle for a spot in the FIFA Women’s World Cup Intercontinental Play Off.

The W Championship finalists will also secure a berth in the 2028 LA Summer Olympics Games Women’s Football Tournament. Should the United States finish as one of the two W Championship finalists, then Concacaf’s second berth will be awarded to the competition’s third-place winner (based on the precedent of host nations’ automatic qualification for previous editions of the Olympic Football Tournament at the Summer Olympic Games).

Further details on next year’s W Championship will be announced at a later date.

The United States is the current champion of the Concacaf W Championship, having secured the 2022 title with a 1–0 win over Canada in the final held in Monterrey, Mexico. The tournament also served as the regional qualifier for the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Canada, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Panama, and Haiti joined the United States in the global event, marking the first time six nations from the Confederation qualified for a FIFA Women’s World Cup.