Preview

26 countries entered the CAF qualification for Italia’90: Algeria, Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

This was a decline from the 1986 World Cup, where 29 teams had participated in the CAF qualification. The six teams that had since disappeared, were Benin, Gambia, Mauritius, Niger, Sierra Leone and Tanzania (all six had that time been eliminated in the preliminaries, and Lesotho, Niger and Togo had even withdrawn before their first match).

Newcomers and rejects

Filling the gap, Gabon, Lesotho and Rwanda entered the 1990 CAF qualification. Of these, Lesotho had participated in two previous World Cup qualifications (1974 and 1982), Gabon had entered a couple of times only to withdraw before the first match, while Rwanda never had entered a World Cup qualification in their history.

Before the draw (which would take place on December 12th 1987 in Zürich), two countries were however refused to participate by FIFA, due to their outstanding debts: Madagascar and Mozambique. The CAF pool was therefore reduced to 24 teams before the draw.

Schedule for the 1st round

It had been decided that 16 countries would play in a preliminary knock-out round (the 1st Round), with the 8 winners progressing to the 2nd Round. In the 2nd round, they would be joined by the 8 seeded teams in the AFC zone: Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Zaire. These teams were seeded due to having qualified for the 1988 edition of the African Cup of Nations in Morocco.

The 16 unseeded countries were divided in two groups, seemingly based on geography. Group 1 would consist of teams from East and South Africa, while Group 2 would contain the countries of the North and West. The 2nd Round would be a round-robin tournament of four groups, where each group would have two seeded teams and one team from Group 1 and 2 from the 1st Round.

The draw for the 1st Round gave the following fixtures:

Withdrawals: Lesotho, Rwanda and Togo

Three countries later withdrew from the qualification, leaving the competition before their first scheduled game: Lesotho, Rwanda and Togo. The withdrawal was perhaps as expected from Lesotho, who had not participated in any qualification for a major tournament since the early 1980s, either withdrawn or not entered. Rwanda, however, were to compete in the World Cup qualification for the first time, before eventually withdrawing. Togo had also withdrawn from the 1986 World Cup qualification, although they did participate in the latest version of the ACN qualification, taking place in 1987. The countries that had drawn against these three were given byes into the 2nd Round: Gabon, Zambia and Zimbabwe.