The Confederation of African Football—CAF has announced the seeding system for the final round of qualifying for the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations.
In a communication signed by the CAF secretary general Hicham El Amrani and released on Thursday, a total of 28 teams are taking part in the second round of the preliminaries after the first leg ties were played in February and the return legs will be played in June.
Amrani says 14 teams will qualify for the second round and will join the sixteen that took part in the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations for the third and final round of the qualification.
Hosts South Africa are the only nation that have gained automatic qualification.
Champions Zambia and 15 other finalists from the 2012 Nations Cup in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon have all been given byes to the final round. Joining them there will be the 14 winners of the second round ties.
Uganda Cranes who lost their first leg tie to Congo Brazzaville will be more than determined to make it to the next round of the qualifiers. Congo has not qualified for the Nations Cup finals for the past 10 years while Uganda has not been part of proceedings for the last two decades.
The 30 teams will be divided into two pots and each pot will be comprised of 15 teams. A team from pot 1 will play against a team from pot 2 following a draw. As usual, CAF’s ranking of the nation teams will be used to determine the teams that will go to pot 1 and those that will go to pot 2. The classification will be based on the performance of the teams in the last three editions of the African Cup of Nations.
Basing on the performances in the last three Nation Cup events, the classification system has Cup holders Zambia on top with 26 points, Ghana and Cote d’ Ivoire at 22 and Egypt with 21 points.
