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For the first time in the history of African football, fans will be able to watch the matches of the continent’s World Cup qualifiers for free thanks to a recent agreement with FIFA. Starting from Wednesday, African football fans will be able to watch matches of the 2022 World Cup qualifiers for free on the internet after the world governing body, in partnership with CAF, centralized the media rights for the qualifiers.

To ameliorate the heavy burden on the African federations of producing the matches, FIFA has heavily invested in the television production of the qualifiers and will make the first round of matches available for free.

Matches will be streamed live on FIFA.com and FIFA’s YouTube channel, giving fans unfettered access which would have been hitherto available only to some pay-tv stations.

This comes as a massive boost to ordinary football fans who will be able to watch their teams as the qualifiers are played between 4 to 10 September.

Most of the 28 matches in the first round of the qualifiers will be shown for free, giving the fans the opportunity of watching their teams at their comfort especially with away matches which is normally not easy for travelling fans in Africa.

Both the home and away legs of the matches will be covered as the countries will fight to be among the 14 sides to join the rest of the 26 at group phase.