Tournament details | |
---|---|
Dates | 15 June 2011 – 15 October 2013 |
Teams | 35 (from 1 confederation) |
Tournament statistics | |
Matches played | 144 |
Goals scored | 444 (3.08 per match) |
Attendance | 2,205,645 (15,317 per match) |
Top scorer(s) | Deon McCaulay (11 goals) |
The CONCACAF qualification for the 2014 FIFA World Cup consisted of four rounds of competition, in which the 35 member nations competed for three automatic berths at the finals in Brazil.
The United States, Costa Rica, and Honduras qualified. The fourth-place finisher, Mexico, played a two-game series against New Zealand, the first-placed team from Oceania and qualified to the Finals.
In March 2011, following news that CONCACAF would not receive four spots in the 2014 World Cup, officials within CONCACAF indicated that the first format proposed would be revised. Several days later, officials within CONCACAF announced the qualifying format they would present to FIFA. The proposed format, which was subsequently accepted by FIFA, consists of 4 stages.
All 35 FIFA-affiliated national teams from CONCACAF entered qualification. The seeding – used to draw the first three rounds of the qualifiers – was based on the FIFA World Rankings of March 2011. (World rankings shown in parentheses)
The schedule of the competition was as follows.
The inter-confederation play-off between the fourth-placed team from CONCACAF (Mexico) and the winning team from OFC (New Zealand) was played between 13–20 November 2013.
The first round of the CONCACAF qualifiers saw the bottom 10 teams being paired up into five home-and-away series, with the highest ranked team facing the lowest ranked team and so on. The winners of these series proceeded to the second round.
The matchups were announced by FIFA on 26 April 2011. Early indications were that the matches would be played on 3 and 7 June 2011; However, the matches were postponed to scattered days in June and July, between 15 June and 17 July. The 5 winners (in bold, below) advanced to the second round of the CONCACAF qualifiers: Belize, Dominican Republic, U.S. Virgin Islands, Saint Lucia, and the Bahamas.