Draw will turn focus from controversy, to World Cup

03 December 2009

by Jerrad Peters

FIFA officials held their year-end meeting on Robben Island, Thursday, and toured the facilities that once detained apartheid activists such as Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma. The return to regular business followed an emergency gathering a day earlier in Cape Town, where the governing body pledged to do absolutely nothing about video replay, additional linesmen, goal-line technology and rampant corruption.

It's been a turbulent few weeks for FIFA president Sepp Blatter & co. But in a matter of hours, he and his deputies will finally tackle the job that brought them to South Africa in the first place. Just after 7:30 pm local time, they will group the World Cup's 32 qualified teams into eight brackets. It may sound like tedious work, but it's anything but. Aside from being the most highly anticipated event of its kind in the history of the competition, Friday's World Cup draw will also provide some much-needed closure to the controversies that have engulfed FIFA for much of the season. No one—or very few people—will be interested in discussing transfer embargos, hand-balls or match-fixing anymore. No, everything from hereon in will centre on the World Cup group stage and the matches that will be scheduled by Friday midnight.

There are plenty of reasons to get excited about the draw. For one thing, it will be the first World Cup-related event to truly focus the world's attention on South Africa. Heavyweights such as France, Portugal and Ivory Coast are going into the draw as unseeded sides, setting up the potential for one or two compelling Groups of Death. Charlize Theron will be there, and David Beckham will be hobnobbing his way around the Cape Town Convention Centre, trying to charm the decision-makers into awarding the 2018 World Cup to England.

If only the show would be as stimulating as the storylines. As anyone who has watched a World Cup draw can attest, there isn't a more tiresome exhibition this side of the Academy Awards. It's two-and-a-half hours of speeches, musical performances, magic shows and more speeches—with a World Cup draw thrown in at the very end for good measure. Exciting stuff. And the process of the draw—which will be painstakingly explained by FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke shortly before 10 o'clock—will do nothing to get you out of your seat.

Here's how it works.

The 32 teams have been grouped into four pots of eight. Pot 1 features the seeded teams: South Africa (hosts), Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Argentina and England. They will be distributed separately throughout the eight World Cup groups.

Pot 2 will include the qualified teams from Asia, CONCACAF and Oceania. They are Australia, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Honduras, Mexico, United States and New Zealand.

Pot 3 will consist of the un-seeded African and South American entrants: Algeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The unseeded European teams will make up Pot 4. They are Denmark, France, Greece, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland.

Following their principle of geographic separation, FIFA will ensure that teams from the same confederation (with the exception of UEFA) will not occupy the same World Cup group. They will ensure this by placing the first two African sides drawn from Pot 3 into groups with Brazil and Argentina. The first South American side chosen from Pot 3 will be bracketed with South Africa.

Of course, the process is only the means to an end—an end that football fans across the globe will be breathlessly anticipating until the draw is complete. As a TV show, the World Cup draw scores one star, tops. But as a generator of international storylines, it takes some beating.

 

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