Qualification process for ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2021 confirmed

The International Cricket Council (ICC) on Thursday confirmed the qualification process for the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2021.

The tournament will be played in India. It will be a 16-team competition. The T20 World Cup 2021 will be replacing the eight-team Champions Trophy.

The World Cup of the shortest format will see 11 regional qualification events taking place across the five ICC regions -- Africa, America, Asia, East-Asia Pacific, and Europe -- with eight teams progressing to one of two global qualifying events.

"The decision to replace the Champions Trophy with a T20 World Cup in 2021 was driven by our commitment to global growth and use T20 as our vehicle to do that. Of course, that presented us with a one-off qualification challenge," ICC's Head of Events Chris Tetley said in an official statement.

"Our regional and global qualification pathways have been established and consistently provide compelling and competitive cricket and we didn't want to lose that despite the tight timelines available to us," he added.

The bottom four teams from the ICC T20 Men's World Cup this year will be joining the regional qualifiers in the global qualification events along with the next four best T20I ranked teams as of January 1, 2020: Zimbabwe, Nepal, UAE, and Hong Kong.

This means that a total of 16 teams will compete for four T20 World Cup spots in two global qualifiers with the top two teams from each progressing to the event proper in 2021.

The 12 teams, which make round two of the ICC T20 World Cup 2020 in Australia, will gain automatic entry into the event the following year.

There will be a total of 11 regional qualification events between March and September 2020.

The two eight-team global qualifiers will take place between March and July 2021 and the distribution of the 16 teams across the two events will be confirmed following the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2020 when all participants will be known.