With the first round of the 2025 Concacaf Women’s Under-17 Qualifiers in the books, the names of all 12 teams that will face off in the final round are now known.
Joining the four teams that received byes to the final round — the USA, Mexico, Canada, and Haiti — are six group winners: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Puerto Rico.
Two second-place teams, Bermuda and Trinidad & Tobago, also advanced (Concacaf news item). The six groups were unbalanced, with two groups having just three teams instead of four, so a weighted points system (points divided by matches played) was apparently used (the regulations document is silent on this matter, but it has been used in the past). However, due to a quirk in that ranking system, one or both of those teams may have advanced more on the luck of the draw rather than on sporting factors.
For the final round, which is scheduled to start on Monday, March 31st, the above 12 teams will be divided into three round-robin groups of four. The top team from each group, along with the best second-place team from among those three groups, will advance to the 2025 FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup.
Match results and standings for the first round can be viewed on Concacaf’s website. Highlights for the matches are available on YouTube (playlist) and the Concacaf W x.com account.
Likely Pots for the Final Round Group Draw
The regulations for the 2025 Concacaf Women’s Under-17 Qualifiers do not specify how the draw will be handled, but based on prior Concacaf tournaments, there will be four pots with three teams each. The teams will be splits among the pots based on the Concacaf rankings for Under-17 Women’s National Teams, which should be updated in the next few weeks.
Based on the most recently published Concacaf rankings, which are from March 2024, the four pots should be:
- USA (1), Mexico (2), Canada (3)
- Haiti (4), Costa Rica (5), Puerto Rico (6)
- El Salvador (7), Panama (9), Trinidad & Tobago (10)
- Nicaragua (11), Honduras (12), Bermuda (13)
The date and time of the draw for the final round has not been publicly announced.
For more details about the Concacaf Women’s Under-17 Qualifiers, see the last section of the following post: “U-17 USWYNT: First camp of 2025 announced — Four players from 2024 U-17 WWC return, just nine return from previous camp”.
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