After Tuesday night’s final group games across Europe, the pots for the play-off draw were all but confirmed \u2013 with just Fifa’s rankings on Wednesday left to rubber stamp the standings.<\/p>\n
But Wales’ victory means they will definitely be in pot two among the second batch of seeds.<\/p>\n
And that means they are certain to play a team from pot three at home in Cardiff for the one-off semi-final on 26 March 2026.<\/p>\n
They look to include a Republic of Ireland side still revelling in their qualification for the play-offs after Troy Parrott’s late heroics against Hungary.<\/p>\n
Other potential opponents include Albania who finished 10 points behind England in Group K and have never qualified for the World Cup. <\/p>\n
Kosovo \u2013 who Wales have never played \u2013 are the other pot three possibility, the nation aiming for their first major finals less than ten years on from their first ever qualification fixture as an independent nation having finished runners up in Group B behind Switzerland.<\/p>\n
Bosnia had been heading for automatic qualification before a late goal for Austria in Vienna knocked them back into the play-offs, where they will be in pot three.<\/p>\n
Wales (34) are higher than all four in the Fifa rankings (Albania 61, Bosnia 75, Kosovo 84, Republic of Ireland 62).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Tuesday night’s final group games across Europe, the pots for the play-off draw were all but confirmed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-294004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}