Soccer

World Cup 2014 Draw

87 Comments

Discuss the draw here without showing up in the sidebar. Again, here are the pots. Drawing is on ESPN2 & WatchESPN.com at 11:30/10:30 Central.

Pot 1Pot 2Pot 3Pot 4
BrazilChileJapanNetherlands
ArgentinaEcuadorIranItaly
ColombiaCôte d'IvoireKorea RepublicEngland
UruguayGhanaAustraliaPortugal
SpainAlgeriaUSAGreece
GermanyNigeriaMexicoBosnia-Herzegovina
BelgiumCameroonCosta RicaCroatia
SwitzerlandHondurasRussia
France

Final draw

Group AGroup BGroup CGroup DGroup EGroup FGroup GGroup H
BrazilSpainColombiaUruguaySwitzerlandArgentinaGermanyBelgium
CroatiaHollandGreeceCosta RicaEcuadorBosnia-HerzegovinaPortugalAlgeria
MexicoChileCote d'IvoireEnglandFranceIranGhanaRussia
CameroonAustraliaJapanItalyHondurasNigeriaUSAKorea Republic

Group G Schedule

MONDAY, JUNE 16, 2014
12:00 ET Germany v Portugal
6:00 ET Ghana v USA

SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 2014
3:00 ET Germany v Ghana

SUNDAY, JUNE 22, 2014
3:00 ET USA v Portugal

THURSDAY, JUNE 26, 2014
12:00 ET USA v Germany
12:00 ET Portugal v Ghana

87 thoughts on “World Cup 2014 Draw”

        1. Well, I tried anyway.

          WILL - DON'T LOOK OVER HERE

          Maybe by the end of the day this'll get pushed down the sidebar and people won't have it spoiled.

          1. Okay, I think I got it. The "Show no comments to articles of the following categories" doesn't work. Instead have to choose the categories that should appear. That's a lot.

              2. Seriously, this plugin sucks for filtering categories. Combined with stupid caching (the new one is no different there, wtf people) makes it difficult to test. Now it's not filtering anything and might eventually get back to filter some subset of categories.

  5. Maybe I'm just not remembering correctly, but I was more impressed with Nate Silver on TV when I saw him some years ago.

    1. In fact, all of Pot 1 is completely unexciting--we know they are all going to different pots, the letter of the pot that they are assigned to is completely irrelevant unless you have some kind of letter superstition.

  12. I know that this has been mentioned before, but I feel like with no team from Oceania and no weak host team, it seems like there won't be any particularly favorable groups.

  14. If the US would go on a RAMPAGE! though Group G, that'd be cool

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cR-WiGKZtg

      1. You've got to be fucking kidding me. Godfuckingdammit. (By the way, I'm caught up!)

  27. Fucking France. Goddamn it. They fell ass-backwards into to the easiest draw after nearly not qualifying.

  29. I suppose the upside of getting in Ghana's group is that there is no CONMEBOL team in the group, which is a small consolation.

    1. Thinking back on it, it seems as though the US was always likely to be in a Group of Death. Not to completely discount the Asian teams, but you could easily argue that the US was the best team in Pot C. Almost all the teams in other pots were really strong.

      1. Further on this thought, coming from CONCACAF, the US really needs to get to Pot A to ever have a particularly favorable draw. But I think it's going to be really hard to ever get seeded by qualifying out of CONCACAF because qualifying requires so many games against teams that aren't going to help your FIFA ranking much.

        1. I don't know anything about this qualifying stuff. Care to explain it to someone interested in learning more?

            1. I'm interested enough that I'm in this thread, and wouldn't have been 4 years ago. But not so interested that I read anything about it before today.

              1. Slots for the World Cup are allocated on a geographical basis. FIFA has 6 continental federations - UEFA, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL, CAF, AFC, and OFC (Europe, North and Central America and Caribbean, South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania). Each federation gets a certain number of slots, based on their relative strength. Stronger federations (UEFA, CONMEBOL) get more slots, weaker federations get fewer (Oceania for instance didn't get one this year).

                Each federation runs it's own qualification schemes. They're all multi-staged. I'm most familiar with the CONCACAF qualification. Teams are put into pools, and play each other, then the winners of those go into a 6-team round robin (The Hex). Top 3 go to the world cup, 4th plays Oceania in a playoff.

                1. How do they decide relative strength/appropriate number of slots? How often do they revisit that? How do they decide seeds among the qualifying teams, such that they decide which pot to put them in?

                  1. I think some committee decides--smoke-filled room, etc. There's definitely not some master formula. They need to balance it being an actual world tournament--having significant geographic coverage--against having it be all the best teams in the world. I'm sure you could come up with a stronger 32-team field, but there would probably be more Euro and South American sides at the expense of North America, Asia, and Africa.

                    3. More recent data is just as much of a mixed bag. Friendlies are often glorified scrimmages (with wildly varying lineup quality). There really just isn't much good confederation vs. confederation data in general, because there are so few tournaments that teams take seriously where you have representatives from multiple confederations. Obviously you can massage the data from the friendlies to give you more information--it's not an impossible task--but that also would make for a really opaque system that no one would be that comfortable with. I'm all good with using, say fWAR to come up with MVP rankings because MVP rankings don't really matter, but you wouldn't want to use, say, Pythagorean records to decide who wins the division, even if they are a good predictor of future performance.

                      Not seeding teams at all would be an alternative, but I don't know that it would really be better.

                2. It's a total nit, but I don't think CONMEBOL is multi-staged. They only have 10 teams and I think they just have a single table.

              2. I'm interested enough that I'm in this thread, and wouldn't have been 4 years ago.
                First soccer, next basketball!

          2. I think the most pertinent thing here is that the final round of qualifying out of CONCACAF is a group of 6 teams, which was the US, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and Jamaica. You play each team in the group home-and-home. Because travel in the region sucks (among probably other reasons) it's really difficult to win on the road. So the US winds up playing a lot of games against teams with pretty weak FIFA rankings, and it's rare to have a blowout win. I don't really know how the FIFA rankings work exactly, but that seems to make it really, really difficult to have a top-7 or top-8 FIFA ranking to get in Pot A. I mean, the US went 7-1-2 in the last round of qualifying, with the loss coming in the first game of that round, which is practically as good as you could expect anyone to do, and they still didn't make Pot A. It seems like the only way they can improve their ranking is for the other CONCACAF teams to get better, or to start just trouncing everyone else.

              1. A college analog would be if the NCAA decided that each conference got a certain number of bids to the national tournament, and then they used rankings to keep the top 8 teams into different groups after all the teams had qualified. The seeding would be a factor, but each team still controls its own destiny, whereas in the BCS you can win all of your games and still get left out.

          3. Basics:

            There are 6 soccer confederations (loosely based on the continents). Each confederation gets a certain number of teams in each World Cup.

            UEFA - Europe (13 teams)
            CONCACAF - North/Central America (4 teams)
            CONMEBOL - South America (5 teams + host Brazil)
            CAF - Africa (5 teams)
            AFC - Asia (4 teams)
            OFC - Oceania (0 teams - the champion of this federation gets a play-in game, which they lost to Mexico this year)

            The qualification tournaments start a long time before the World Cup (two years?) and each confederation has a different format, CONMEBOL throws everyone into one round-robin tournament, UEFA sets up 9 mini-round robins, CONCACAF has a series of groups that a team has to progress through.

      2. Yeah, this is true. A Group of Death for me means all 4 teams are good and have an equal chance of qualifying. The best team in CAF, CONCACAF, the second best team in Europe, and the team with the best player in the world. Most 'Groups of Death' in recent tournaments have been 3 strong teams and one weak team.

        1. In some ways I'd rather have 4 quality teams than 3 teams and a weak team. With the all the teams being so equal, you could imagine getting through on a couple draws and a win. It's probably tougher in the end to have 4 quality teams in a group, but that 3/1 split always makes me uncomfortable.

          1. You definitely have a point about the 3/1 split. Figure that one weak team is 3 guaranteed points for the other three teams, but you stumble and draw (or even lose somehow). You're pretty much stuck in 3rd straight away. More parity should mean more teams drawing each other and a better chance to advance with a small stumble.

  32. I'm coming around on the draw. The chance to take out both Cristiano Ronaldo and Ghana in the opening round is a great opportunity.

    2. I'm with Homer Dome here. Germany is a given and should demolish the rest of the group. We need to get the Ghana monkey off our back (and it's our first game) and Portugal is doable. Plus can you image the coverage if USA beats Ronaldo?!? USA will come out of Group G with a ton of confidence and a lot of soccer-curious folks interested in this team.

      Great moments... are born from great opportunity -- Herb Brooks.

      1. I guess I don't immediately buy that Germany will demolish the rest of the group. Consider Nate Silver's rankings (probably better than FIFA's rankings anyway) of Germany's qualifying group and their WC group:

        16 -- Portugal
        17 -- USA
        24 -- Ghana
        29 -- Sweden
        36 -- Austria
        40 -- Ireland
        117 -- Kazakhstan
        156 -- Faroe Islands

        By these rankings, literally every team in their WC Group is better than every team in their qualifying group. Travel is also really easy in UEFA (by far the lowest home-field advantage of any confederation's qualifying). Obviously they are a really talented team, and they are easily the pick to finish first, but Portugal, USA, and Ghana are all capable of beating them in a neutral site, especially when you consider the "shit happens" factor. (Like US over Spain in the '09 Confederations Cup, for instance.)

        Here's a different list: US Hex opponents and German qualifying opponents:

        25 -- Costa Rica
        26 -- Mexico
        29 -- Sweden
        33 -- Honduras
        36 -- Austria
        40 -- Ireland
        45 -- Honduras
        67 -- Jamaica
        117 -- Kazakhstan
        156 -- Faroe Islands

        I think it's quite possible that Germany's 10-0 qualifying record overstates their quality.

        1. Woe is me for going against Nate Silver, but I think Germany is the team to beat this time around. Demolish may be a strong word but I think only a home Brazil squad is the only thing standing between Germany and the cup. Bookmark these words and make me eat them is 7 months. I will gladly do so.

          1. I guess I was mainly reacting to demolish being such a strong word. I mean, what makes you feel that Germany is much better than last time around when they lost to Serbia in group play and squeaked past Ghana 1-0? Only Argentina and the Netherlands made it through group play undefeated last time around--the Netherlands won their games 2-0, 1-0, and 2-1. Argentina won their games 1-0, 4-1, 2-0. (And both of those groups are arguably weaker than Germany's group this time around.) I just don't see much demolition in the World Cup. Definite favorite, sure, but it's not hard to see them finishing the group with 2 wins and a loss or a draw.

          2. Also, the US was the only team to beat Germany in 2013. Because freedom. (Yeah, I know it's a friendly and it doesn't really count, but hey, I don't always have to be a slave to rational thought, right?)

            1. I'll come out and say that a draw is a possible result. The US has the biggest edge in the world against Germany by having Jurgen Klinsmann as their manager. The US is also the most German-infused squad outside of Germany and Switzerland. And just like the US, Germany has to also play Ghana and Portugal. If 4 points can see the team through in this tough group, then a draw against Germany and a win against either Ghana or Portugal can do it.

  33. Gentlemen, I just realized we may be forced to root for Cristiano Ronaldo to beat someone to help us out. I'm not comfortable with this.

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