World Cup’s Luck of the Draw

For an event that takes place every 4 years, that captivates most of the world, you’d think there’d be some kind of process to ensure an equal chance of succeeding. Even college basketball has it’s Secret Committee which locks itself in a hotel room, and comes up with some kind of basis to determine the seedings.

In the World Cup, they just adopt an arbitrary system to determine the top 8 teams. (there are 8 groups of 4 teams, top 2 in each group move on to the next round). The World Cup decided to take a statistical ranking of teams from the last 6 years. This would be about as meaningful as looking at a college basketball team over the last 6 years. As a result, one of the best European teams, the Netherlands, did not get a seed, and neither did the US, due to the US’s last-place finish in the 1998 World Cup.

After completing the top 8 teams, they then literally draw ping-pong balls out of “regional” bowls. This style of picking the tournament is the berth of the phrase “Group of Death”, which happens every World Cup, to one unlucky group which contains teams all capable of being quarterfinalists.

The US this time has ended up in the 2nd toughest group of Italy, Czech Republic, and Ghana. Most likely, the “Group of Death” this time is Argentina, Ivory Coast, Netherlands, and Serbia-Montenagro. The Ivory Coast is supposed to be the strongest African team, meaning that group has strong teams 1-4. The US group is just a problem due to the fact that Czech, Italy, and the US are all top 12 teams!

The worst part of all for the Americans, is that even if they find a way to finish in 2nd place in their group, their reward would likely be a date with Brazil. And by date, I mean death.

The only good news is that my research shows that Ghana qualified from a pathetic random grouping of African nations that had never made the World Cup. At least the US shouldn't finish last!

Here is the Goldberg plan: either a) use a statistical formula to at least make the groups somewhat equal, b) after seeding 8 teams, seed the top remaining European teams to go into the same group as non-European superpowers (i.e. this year Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina would automatically draw the top 3 remaining European teams of Czech, Netherlands, and Sweden,
or c) form your own Secret Committee like the NCAA does!