FIFA Announces Pots for Draw

FIFA has announced the pots for the World Cup draw, with one major surprise. Instead of using the same type of formula they used last time, which I used in a past article to calculate the 7 seeded teams along with South Africa, they just used the FIFA rankings from last month. This meant that France dropped out and the Netherlands became seeded. That's a pretty big break from tradition as they've used roughly the same seeding formula for the last handful of World Cups.

Here are the pots:

Seeded:
Argentina
Brazil
England
Germany
Italy
Netherlands
South Africa
Spain

Pot 2:
Australia
Japan
North Korea
South Korea
New Zealand
Honduras
Mexico
United States

Pot 3:
Algeria
Cameroon
Côte d’Ivoir
Ghana
Nigeria
Chile
Paraguay
Uruguay

Pot 4:
Denmark
France
Greece
Portugal
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Switzerland

Here are a few thoughts:
- The second pot contains no teams from the same confederation as the seeded pot. This means that for those teams, each of the seeded teams are equally likely.

- If you are like most people and think that South Africa is by far the easiest draw from the seeded pot then the unseeded South American sides have an edge because each has a 1 in 3 chance of playing in South Africa's group. This point and the last one are because no two teams from the same confederation other than UEFA can be put into the same group.

- If you're French or a fan you obviously aren't happy. If you are Dutch then I'm sure you are. For the rest of the world, the only change as far as the seeding goes is that France replaced the Netherlands as the big team you'd like to avoid. In my view, and probably that of most others, France, Portugal and the Ivory Coast are clearly the best three teams that aren't seeded. I think it's a lock that one of those three will be in what is considered the group of death.

- The United States and Mexico are also very likely to be in the group of death. Keep in mind that this doesn't mean the draw will be tougher. The US and Honduras have the exact same probability of drawing any given set of opponents, but because the US and Mexico are the best two teams in their pot they are likely to be in the group of death.

- Perhaps because of South Africa or maybe just some kind of recency bias, it seems like there is more on the line in terms of how tough the groups could be. A possible group is Brazil, the United States, Ivory Coast and France. Another is South Africa, North Korea, Uruguay and Slovenia. For countries like the US, Denmark, Chile and Ghana there are possible groups where it would be very unlikely to get out, maybe a 10% chance, and others where it would be a near certainty.