MIES (Switzerland) - The seedings for the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2023 European Pre-Qualifiers First Round have been announced for Tuesday's draw, with eight European national teams set to find out their opponents.

Featuring Albania, Belarus, Cyprus, Iceland, Kosovo, Luxembourg, Portugal and Slovakia, the ceremony will take place at the Patrick Baumann House of Basketball in Mies, Switzerland on October 29, 2019 at 13:00 CET (GMT+1).

As per competition regulations and handbook, the teams will be drawn into two (2) groups of four (4) teams each and play each other in Round Robin format, home and away.

The seedings are based on the FIBA World Ranking, presented by NIKE and are as follows:

Seed 1: Iceland and Belarus;
Seed 2: Portugal and Slovakia;
Seed 3: Kosovo and Cyprus;
Seed 4: Luxembourg and Albania.

The First Round of the European Pre-Qualifiers will be played 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, 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.

FIBA Basketball World Cup 2023 marks the first time in the competition's history that it is staged in more than one country, with Indonesia, Japan and Philippines winning the rights to co-host the 32-team flagship event in a joint bid.

###

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).

For further information about FIBA, visit fiba.basketball or follow FIBA on facebook.com/fiba, twitter.com/fiba,  instagram.com/fiba and youtube.com/fiba.