2018 ConIFA World Football Cup qualification
| Tournament details | |
|---|---|
| Dates | 6 January 2016 - |
| Teams | 21 (from 1 confederation) |
| Tournament statistics | |
| Matches played | 26 |
| Goals scored | 109 (4.19 per match) |
The 2018 ConIFA World Football Cup qualification is a process to decide a number of the teams that will play in the 2018 ConIFA World Football Cup. This is the second tournament to feature a qualification process, following on from the 2016 qualification. The first qualification match played was on 13 March 2016 between the Tamil Eelam team and the team representing the Romani people, with the first goal scored by Tamil Eelam's Panushanth Kulenthiran.
The Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA) was founded in June 2013, as an organisation to represent football associations that are not eligible or choose not to join FIFA. One year later, it held its first official tournament, the 2014 ConIFA World Football Cup, in Sweden, to which the twelve participating teams were invited. The success of this tournament led to the decision to make it a biannual competition, with continental tournaments taking place in between, the first of which was the 2015 ConIFA European Football Cup.
ConIFA published a set of qualification criteria for the World Football Cup ahead of its 2017 Annual General Meeting, setting out the various methods in which teams could qualify for the WFC:
ConIFA is split into six continental zones, with the total number of places in the World Football Cup based on the number of ConIFA members from each zone. As of April 2017, the distribution of places for the WFC, dependent on the size of the final tournament, is:
[a]: There are no South American members of ConIFA as of April 2017
The first qualifying process was undertaken for the 2016 ConIFA World Football Cup, which saw a series of friendly matches and tournaments, together with the 2015 ConIFA European Football Cup, designated as qualifiers for the 2016 WFC. However, this decision was taken at a late stage prior to the start of the European Football Cup tournament, only a year prior to the planned start of the 2016 WFC in Abkhazia. As a consequence, for its 2018 WFC tournament, ConIFA began designating planned friendly matches as qualifiers from the beginning of 2016, allowing a greater time for those teams achieving qualification to plan for the tournament. The first of these was the ConIFA Challenger Cup, held in Remscheid on 12 and 13 March 2016.
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