{"id":41326,"date":"2021-01-02T08:02:06","date_gmt":"2021-01-02T16:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=41326"},"modified":"2021-01-02T08:02:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-02T16:02:06","slug":"afc-to-centralize-world-cup-qualifiers-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2021\/01\/02\/afc-to-centralize-world-cup-qualifiers-report\/","title":{"rendered":"AFC to centralize World Cup qualifiers [Report]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Mehr News &#8211; KUALA LUMPUR, <strong>The Asian Football Confederation has reportedly decided to stage all matches of the 2022 World Cup qualifiers in Qatar.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Goal.com Arabic service has quoted sources as saying that the Confederation has opted for staging matches in a centralized manner in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also because of Qatar\u2019s successful hosting of the 2020 AFC Champions League.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to the report, the 2022 World Cup qualifiers which also acts as a qualification for the 2023 AFC Asian Cup will be held in Qatar from late-May to mid-June, 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The report also claims&nbsp;that the 2021 AFC Champions League would also start in May or April.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If realized, the new schedule will be bad news for the Iranian National Football Team that sits third in Group C of Qualifiers behind Iraq and Bahrain. Team Melli could lose the opportunity to host Bahrain, Iraq, and Hong Kong in decisive matches of this round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The report comes as the dates of Iran\u2019s matches in the qualifiers were announced in early December. According to that schedule, Dragan Skocic&#8217;s team would take on Hong Kong on March 25, 2021, before facing Cambodia five days later and then lock horns with Bahrain on June 7 and Iraq on June 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mehr News &#8211; KUALA LUMPUR, The Asian Football Confederation has reportedly decided to stage all&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":41327,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,92,91,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news","category-c21-international-football-news","category-c20-other-news","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":877,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41328,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41326\/revisions\/41328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}