Asian Zone World Cup Qualifiers for the third round will begin early next month and we will see quite lot of matches categorized into 3 group, each group filled by 6 countries.
In this third round, it can also be said to be determinant for which countries are able to qualify to enter and participate in the real competition later in 2026, besides that in the third round we can see meeting between the team that are indeed the strongest for the Asian zone.
Here, what is quite easy to compete is group C, we can see that group C is filled by team that can be said to be not strong teams for Asia overall, maybe only Japan is the strongest team here and they are the favorites for group C.
Because FIFA has decided to added more participant on world cup 2026 from 32 to 48 countries then the effect is Asia Zone will gets more ticket than the previous world cup and for the current world cup Asia will gets total 8 tickets and 1 ticket from play off stages so this makes some of teams on the 3rd round will have more opportunities to advances to the group stages of world cup or at least will qualified to the 4th round
And for group C i have to says this is hell group because in this group there are some of strong teams who always be regularly to participant to world cup such as Saudi Arabia ,Japan and Australia and these teams will fight to gets top 2 position on round 3 because if i am not mistaken the teams who finish on that position will be automatically advances to the world cup
The group C fight will be very interesting to see. I think the ones qualifying from this group will be Japan and Saudi Arabia. Australia did not qualify for the previous world cup, so I think they will be very hungry to get their tickets as early as possible. It will be very hard to predict between Australia and Saudi Arabia but I believe Saudi Arabia will go through.
On the other hand group A looks a little interesting. Iran, Qatar, and UAE are some of the teams to look out for. And also no one knows how North Korea might play so it would be interesting to see their performance.
Making the prediction of Group B seems rather easy, South Korea and Iraq are the clear favorites. But in international games, upsets are seen quite often. So it would be quite interesting to see how they turn out.
Duke Khan