Zurich to host draw for the 2026 World Cup qualification

The Spanish national team's road to the next World Cup in 2026 begins this Friday 13 December at the headquarters of FIFA (Zurich) with the draw for the qualification stage. From 12:00 noon, the national team will find out the opponents against whom they will battle it out for one of the 16 places allocated to the UEFA members.
The qualifying phase will be played from March 2025 and will conclude in November of the same year. In total there will be 12 groups of four or five teams each. In the draw there will be five pots, with Spain in number one along with the other seven nations that will play in the quarter-finals of the Nations League and the four teams with the highest FIFA ranking not present in the quarter-finals.
This is the makeup of the five pots:
If Spain beat the Netherlands and reach the Final Four of the Nations League, they will be placed in a group of just four teams and will play their qualification matches from September to November 2025. If they fail to reach the Nations League finals, they could be drawn into either a four- or five-team group. In the case of the latter, they would start their World Cup qualification campaign in June.
In addition, there are a series of other factors such as climate, distance as well as political motives that determine one’s other group members. In the case of Spain, possible clashes with the Gibraltar and Kazakhstan teams are excluded. Furthermore, no group may contain more than two teams from this list: Estonia, Finland, Faroe Islands, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Iceland.
The Spanish national team will be represented in the draw by Pablo Amo, assistant coach to Luis de la Fuente.