MIES (Switzerland) - The draw ceremony for the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2023 European Pre-Qualifiers First Round took place at the Patrick Baumann House of Basketball on Tuesday, setting the stage for the preliminary stage of the competition.

The eight European teams involved – Albania, Belarus, Cyprus, Iceland, Kosovo, Luxembourg, Portugal and Slovakia – found out their opponents for the start of the pre-qualifying campaign for the next edition of FIBA's flagship event.

The teams were drawn into two groups of four teams each as follows:

The First Round of the Pre-Qualifiers will be played in a Round Robin format, home and away, across three windows on February 17-25, 2020, November 23 - December 1, 2020 and February 15-23, 2021 with two games played by each team in every window.

The top two teams from each group will advance to the European Pre-Qualifiers Second Round, to be played in the summer of 2021, where they will be joined by eight teams from the FIBA EuroBasket 2021 Qualifiers to compete for a total of eight available berths in the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2023 European Qualifiers.

The 32-team team field of the European Qualifiers will also include all 24 teams competing in the Final Round of the FIBA EuroBasket 2021.

To be co-hosted by Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines, FIBA Basketball World Cup 2023 marks the first time in the competition's history that it is staged in more than one country.

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About FIBA
FIBA (fiba.basketball) - the world governing body for basketball, is an independent association formed by 213 National Basketball Federations throughout the world. It is recognized as the sole competent authority in basketball by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

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