The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. will feature six teams from Concacaf, the most ever from the confederation in the expanded, 32-team field.
Of course, Concacaf doesn’t have the numbers like Europe, but Concacaf is tied with the Asian Football Confederation with the second-most number of teams competing in Australia and New Zealand.
How did it happen? Four teams qualified from the Concacaf W Championship. Eight teams competed in the group stage, and the four teams that advanced to the knockout round also punched their ticket to the World Cup. Those teams were the United States, Canada, Costa Rica and Jamaica.
Meanwhile, the third-place finishers in the group stage — Haiti and Panama — advanced to the inter-confederation playoffs this past February.
That’s where Concacaf shined. A total of 11 teams competed for three valuable spots in this summer’s tournament. Haiti and Panama took two of the three spots. The Haitians took care of business against Senegal and a highly-favored Chile squad. Meanwhile, Panama earned their ticket to the World Cup with wins over Papua New Guinea and Paraguay. It was a much different story than four years ago, when Panama lost to Argentina in the global playoffs.
That’s how six teams from Concacaf found themselves going to the World Cup. The United States and Canada are the two highest-ranked teams from the region, and plenty of pre-tournament coverage has been dedicated to them — see, for instance, how the U.S. will combat the loss of defender and captain Becky Sauerbrunn, and how Canada is battling their federation in a pay dispute.
In this article, we at The Equalizer are taking a look at the other four nations going to the Women’s World Cup — two of them for the first time in their nation’s history — and how they may fare on the big stage.
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