by Simon Wright

Created on: January 29, 2009

The FIFA World Cup is held every four years and determines which country is crowned as being the best football (soccer) nation on the planet. The 2010 World Cup is due to be held in South Africa and (as hosts) the South Africans are afforded the luxury of automatic qualification. The tournament will include a total of thirty-two nations, so let's look now at how the other thirty-one qualifiers will be decided.

A first point that is worth noting is that the current holders of the World Cup crown (who are Italy) do not qualify automatically. For many years, the holders as well as the hosts were granted an automatic place. More recently, however, FIFA decided that the holders should have to work for the possibility of defending their title.

Football is played all around the world (although sometimes under the guise of soccer) and it is only natural then that the qualifying stages are split by geographic region. The six regional bodies that are recognised by FIFA and that administer the qualifying stages are:

- UEFA (Europe)

- CONMEBOL (South America)

- CONCACAF (North & Central America)

- CAF (Africa)

- AFC (Asia and Australia)

- OFC (Oceania)

The number of qualification places reserved for each confederation is a matter of much ongoing debate. However, at present the qualifications places are split like this:

- Europe - 13

- South America 4 (or 5 if the 5th placed nation beat the 4th placed North American nation in a playoff)

- North & Central America 3 (or 4 if the 4th placed nation beat the 5th placed South American nation)

- Africa 5

- Asia/Australia 4 (or 5 if the 5th placed nation beat the top placed Oceanic nation)

- Oceania - None (or 1 if the top placed nation beat the 5th placed Asian nation)

As you can see, FIFA don't go in for straightforward qualification formats and all those cross continental play off matches could be seen as an unnecessary complication. The number of qualification places that are assigned per region is influenced by which regions have the highest concentration of powerful football nations, and also by political lobby power. Europe and South America remain the powerhouses of world football but opinion remains divided over whether the allocation of qualification places is fair.

Let's now go on to look briefly at how qualification works across the confederations. We'll see that there's quite a lot of variance!

South America:

I'm going to start with South America as its qualification format is significantly different from all the others. There

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