Reggae Girlz learn route to third World Cup berth

IF JAMAICA’S Reggae Girlz are to make it to their third FIFA Women’s World Cup in a row, they will have to navigate Group B of the first round of the Concacaf W Qualifiers.

Jamaica, who have been to the last two World Cups in 2019 and in 2023, were drawn in the second of six groups during a Concacaf ceremony yesterday, and will have to contend with Guyana, Nicaragua, Dominica, and Antigua and Barbuda.

Only the group winners from the six groups, labelled A-F, will qualify for the Concacaf Women’s Championship.

In Group A, Mexico, Puerto Rico, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and the US Virgin Islands will square off.

Group C is made up of Costa Rica, Guatemala, Bermuda, Grenada, and Cayman Islands.

Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Suriname, Belize, and Anguilla find themselves in Group D.

Group E includes Panama, Cuba, St Kitts and Nevis, Curacao, and Aruba, while Group F is made up of Trinidad and Tobago, El Salvador, Honduras, and Barbados.

The Concacaf W Qualifiers excludes the region’s two highest-ranked nations, the United States and Canada, and will be played during the FIFA women’s international match windows in November, and in February and April of 2026.

At the conclusion of the Concacaf W Qualifiers, the six group winners will join the United States and Canada in the eight-team Concacaf W Championship.

The competition will begin with the quarter-finals, followed by a play-in, semi-finals, third-place match, and final. To determine the quarter-final pairings and each team’s path to the final, Concacaf will rank teams 1-8 based on the FIFA Women’s Rankings, with the highest-ranked team facing the lowest-ranked team.

At the conclusion of the quarter-finals, the four matchup winners will qualify for the semi-finals and guarantee their place in the FIFA Women’s World Cup Brazil 2027, while the four losers will progress to a play-in, from where the two winning teams will each battle for a spot in the FIFA Women’s World Cup Intercontinental Play-Off.

The W Championship finalists will also secure a berth to the 2028 LA Summer Olympics Games Women’s Football Tournament. Should the United States finish as one of the two W Championship finalists, then Concacaf’s second berth will be awarded to the competition’s third-place winner (based on the precedent of host nations’ automatic qualification for previous editions of the Olympic Football Tournament at the Summer Olympic Games).

The United States are the current champions of the Concacaf W Championship, having secured the 2022 title with a 1–0 win over Canada in the final held in Monterrey, Mexico. The tournament also served as the regional qualifier for the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Canada, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Panama, and Haiti joined the United States in the global event, marking the first time six nations from the Confederation qualified for a FIFA Women’s World Cup.