Qualification

As the host nation, South Africa qualifies automatically for the tournament. However, South Africa did participate in World Cup qualifiers because the CAF qualifiers also serve as the qualifying tournament for the 2010 African Cup of Nations. They were the first host since 1934 to participate in preliminary qualifying. As happened in the previous tournament, the defending champions were not given an automatic berth, and Italy had to participate in qualification.


List of qualified teams

The following 32 teams qualified for the final tournament.
AFC
Australia
Japan
Korea DPR
Korea Republic
CAF
Algeria
Cameroon
Côte d'Ivoire
Ghana
Nigeria
South Africa (hosts)
CONCACAF
Honduras
Mexico
United States

CONMEBOL
Argentina
Brazil
Chile
Paraguay
Uruguay

OFC
New Zealand
UEFA
Denmark
England
France
Germany
Greece
Italy
Netherlands
Portugal
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Switzerland
This is the first World Cup with no debutant associations, although two of the qualifiers (Slovakia and Serbia) have previously appeared only as parts of former competing nations. In both cases FIFA considers these teams to have retained the earlier nations' records.