| Tournament details | |
|---|---|
| Dates | 18 August 2004 – 16 November 2005 |
| Teams | 51 (from 1 confederation) |
| Tournament statistics | |
| Matches played | 282 |
| Goals scored | 778 (2.76 per match) |
| Attendance | 5,739,074 (20,351 per match) |
| Top scorer(s) |  Pauleta(11 goals) |
| UEFA European Qualifiers |
|---|
Listed below are the dates and results for the 2006 FIFA World Cup qualification rounds for UEFA teams. A total of 51 teams took part, divided in 8 groups – five groups of six teams each and three groups of seven teams each – competing for 13 places in the World Cup. Germany, the hosts, were already qualified, for a total of 14 European places in the tournament. The qualifying process started on 18 August 2004, over a month after the end of UEFA Euro 2004, and ended on 16 November 2005. Kazakhstan, which transitioned from the Asian Football Confederation to UEFA after the end of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, debuted in the European qualifiers.
The teams in each group would play against each other in a home and away basis. The team with the most points in each group qualified to the World Cup. The runners up are ranked. For fairness rules, results against the seventh placed team were ignored, in groups of seven teams. The two best ranked runners-up also qualified to the World Cup. The other six runners-up were drawn into three two-legged knock out matches, the playoff winners also qualifying.
The race to join hosts Germany at the 2006 FIFA World Cup featured an unlikely winner in Europe, where Ukraine became the first team to qualify, having finished above Turkey, Denmark and Greece in arguably the continent's toughest qualifying group.
France had its first successful World Cup qualifying campaign in twenty years as they had missed the 1990 and 1994 tournaments, then qualified automatically as hosts in 1998 and as defending champions in 2002.
Serbia and Montenegro and Croatia also advanced to Germany at the head of their sections, the former forcing Spain into the playoffs in the process. Besides the eight group winners, two teams progressed automatically as best runners up, namely Poland and Sweden while the playoffs offered a second chance to six others.