After the announcement of Under-19 World Cup Qualifiers and schedule of Women’s World Cup, the International Cricket Council (ICC) has released the qualification pathway for the Men’s T20 World Cup that will be hosted by Australia in 2022. The eighth edition of the T20 World Cup will have 16 spots and 86 nations will be competing to participate in the final showpiece event.
The 15 spots will be decided from a four-step qualifying which starts in April next year. As the host nation, Australia has already qualified for the tournament. The process will have 11 regional qualifying tournaments played across five regions in 2021.
For the first time, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia will be competing for men’s T20 World Cup qualification. It will also be the first time that Japan and Finland will host a men’s T20 World Cup Qualifier. The qualifications would be a 13 month-long process where the teams will play 225 T20 Internationals games.
The ICC mentioned that there will be 67 associate members taking part at the regional level. Owing to the depth of strength in the African and European regions, they will now have a sub-regional qualifier before the final qualifying competition for the respective region.
The Africa, Americas, East Asia-Pacific, and Europe regions will have one top-tier regional qualifier. Asia will have two qualifiers to determine which teams will progress into the two eight-team global qualifiers. The 16 available spots in the global qualifiers will be filled by one team each from Africa and EAP. They will be joined by the two teams from the America, Asia, and Europe.
The remaining eight spots will go to the four bottom teams from the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021, along with Nepal, Singapore, UAE, and Zimbabwe. In the end, the four teams from the two global qualifiers will join hosts Australia and the 11 automatic qualifiers from the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021 to make up the 16-team Men’s T20 World Cup 2022.