Nigeria’s World Cup Hopes Rise After CAF Rule Change

CAF moved to fix an imbalance in Africa’s World Cup qualifiers after Eritrea withdrew from Group E, leaving that pool with five teams instead of six. 

To keep things fair when ranking the four best second-placed teams across all nine groups, CAF says results against each group’s bottom team will be ignored when comparing runners-up. In plain English: your points versus the last-placed side won’t count in the cross-group runners-up table.

When CAF lines up all nine second-placed teams to pick the best four for the play-offs, it will remove any points (and related stats) the runner-up earned against the team that finishes last in their group. This standardises the comparison because one group now has fewer matches.

Why can this help Nigeria

Nigeria’s group still plays by the normal rules to decide first and second. But if Nigeria ends up second, the runners-up comparison becomes friendlier if they didn’t rack up big points against the eventual bottom side while rivals did.

Teams that hammered the bottom team twice could lose as many as six points from their runners-up tally; a team that drew or dropped points there loses less. That narrows the gaps and can lift Nigeria in the adjusted ranking.

The maths (simple example)

• Team A has 14 points, including 6 taken off the bottom team.
  
• Team B has 12 points, including 2 taken off the bottom team.
  After the adjustment for the runners-up table:
  
• Team A’s adjusted points = 14 − 6 = 8
  
• Team B’s adjusted points = 12 − 2 = 10
  Team B jumps ahead despite trailing in the full group table. That’s the kind of swing Nigeria could benefit from if rivals harvested big wins against the bottom side and Nigeria did not.
  

What doesn’t change

Group standings still count every match to decide the group winner and runner-up. The “drop the bottom team” rule applies only when CAF compares all second-placed teams across groups to select the four that advance to the CAF play-offs for a shot at the inter-confederation play-off.

What Nigeria must focus on now

Nothing replaces winning games. Nigeria should still aim for the top spot, but if second place is where they land, the adjusted runners-up table, without bottom-team results, could be kinder than the raw points suggest. Which matches get removed will depend on who actually finishes bottom.