The COVID-19 pandemic has brutally interrupted any activity of the international football starting from the FIFA window in March. Many competitions scheduled in this summer were postponed or cancelled.
What is the situation today? Many confederations have planned the potential resuming of their activities. The situation about the COVID-19 is evolving and nothing is sure in the near future, but we all hope to see soon the national teams back on the pitch.
This are the plan for the various confederations at the moment for the rest of this year:
UEFA – it should be the first confederation to have competitive games starting from september, the only confederation to mantain an international window in this month. The UEFA nations league will start from 3 september, 2020. There will be 2 matchdays in september, 2 in october and 2 in november (schedule here). After the end of the league stage, the finals are scheduled in september and october 2021. In the international window of march 2021 are scheduled the play-offs for the postponed European championship, scheduled now in june 2021.
COMNEBOL – The Copa America 2020 was also postponed in the summer 2021. On 10 July 2020, FIFA announced that the CONMEBOL qualifiers in September 2020 were postponed, with the qualifiers starting in October 2020. CONMEBOL also requested FIFA to include a replacement international window in January 2022 in order to complete the qualifiers in March 2022. The proposal was approved by FIFA on 18 August 2020.
Schedule here .
CONCACAF – The qualifers for the World Cup 2022 should start in october. The draw for the first round was completed and here there is the schedule for the first and the final round (octagonal).
The Concacaf Road to Gold Cup Qualifiers were due to be played in the March 2020 and June 2020 FIFA match windows which were suspended. There will be now a centralized Gold Cup preliminary round for those teams which had been due to play the Road to Gold Cup Qualifiers. This will take place in the United States in the week before the commencement of the Gold Cup group stages. The 2019/20 Concacaf Nations League Finals will now take place in the FIFA match window of March 2021, at a venue in the United States to be determined.
CAF – The African Football Confederation has announced a new schedule for the AFCON qualifiers and the World Cup qualifiers. The AFCON finals were postponed to january, 2022.
AFC – the remaining games for AC2023 and WC2022 qualifiers were originally posponed to october and november 2020, but recently the AFC has postponed again to march 2021. A new calendar is not yet published.
OFC – the Oceanian Football Confederation has the less busy calendar. Due to the evolving situation, the decision was to prudentially postpone the beginning of the World Cup qualifiers to 2021. The details and format are still unknown. Unfortunately the OFC Nations Cup, originally scheduled in june 2020, was definitely cancelled. Here the proposal from the OFC for the WC qualifiers.