The rules for the 16th edition remain the same as those for the previous edition.
1 important date to note: 26 July is the deadline for playing your 4 qualifying matches

The list of the 16 qualifiers will therefore be published on Monday 27 July (a supplementary list of four federations ranked 17th to 20th will also be published, and the four federations on this list will be placed on a waiting list in the event that any of the federations ranked 1st to 16th do not wish to enter the final phase draw.

Any federation that has played, or even simply scheduled, more than four matches by 26 July will not be eligible for qualification,......nor will any federation that has played fewer than four matches but has scheduled a match to be played after 26 July, as this scheduling prevents the manual scheduling of matches for the second phase. There will be no exceptions to this rule.

To put it plainly, if you wish to take part in the second phase of the competition, do not schedule any matches beyond 26 July and wait patiently for the manual scheduling; otherwise, you will not be included in the list of qualified federations.

I would like to remind you that the Federation module still contains a few residual bugs and that, unfortunately, we have no choice but to accept them and sometimes suffer the consequences in terms of the rules.

Finally, I would like to remind you that the competition’s prize money is reserved solely for participants who actually take part in the second phase, according to a scale that remains unchanged from the edition that has just ended, namely:
3M to all qualifiers present in the final draw + 1M per victory in the second phase + prizes for those who reach the podium, namely: 12 M to the winner, 5 M to the runner-up and 3 M to the winner of the third-place play-off).