  Playing in the FIFA World Cup finals is an ambition shared by several
nations. Since, besides luck and skill, the probability of qualification
depends on the design of the qualifiers, the study of these competitions forms
an integral part of sports analytics. The Confederation of North, Central
America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) announced a novel
qualifying format for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in July 2019. However, the
COVID-19 pandemic forced the organisers to return to a more traditional
structure. The present chapter analyses how this reform impacted the chances of
the national teams to qualify. It is found that the probability of
participating in the FIFA World Cup finals can change by more than 5 percentage
points under the assumption of fixed strengths for the teams. The idea behind
the original design, to divide the contestants into two distinct sets, is worth
considering due to the increased competitiveness of the matches played by the
strongest and the weakest teams. We recommend mitigating the sharp nonlinearity
caused by the seeding policy via a probabilistic rule to the analogy of the NBA
draft lottery system.
