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If The World Cup Draw Were Held Today (Sep. 2017)


We are getting mighty close from the draw for the 2018 World Cup, and we just completed another major weekend of World Cup Qualifying!. Thus, it's time for another, likely the penultimate, mock World Cup Draw (TM). For comparison purposes, here was the mock draw from June. And to refresh your memory, here's how I conducted the draw:

The Qualified Teams

  • To determine the 31 squads (in addition to hosts Russia) who would qualify, I mostly went by their current standings in their qualifying groups. This resulted in some pretty major exclusions, perhaps unsurprisingly. The USA is in a precarious situation after a lackluster weekend, and they aren't the only ones. You will surely notice a couple conspicuous absences.

  • In cases of tiebreakers within groups, or to determine playoff results, I relied on the August FIFA Rankings, which are far from a perfect determination of quality, but hey, it's what they use, so what else can I do?

  • There are several teams that have officially qualified at this point. Those teams have been italicized throughout the draw.

The Seeding

  • For Pot 1, Russia was seeded first (per tradition), and the next 7 spots were allocated in order based on the FIFA Rankings of the qualified teams

  • Here's where it gets slightly funky: because Europe gets 13 qualifying spots and only 4 of them were seeded, there were 9 unseeded European teams, one more than the usual Pot size of 8 teams. So:

  • Going off a similar system used in the 2014 Cup Draw, I set up a "Special" pot, consisting of the lowest-ranked European sides

  • To ensure that there wouldn't be confederation overload in a single group (which would be against FIFA rules), I would automatically draw Northern Ireland into the first South American seed's group; similarly, I would draw Peru and Uruguay into the first European seeds' groups.

  • Pots 2, 3 and 4 respectively consisted of African and South American teams, Asian and North American teams, and European teams

  • Here were the spots for the final draw:

The Draw

  • To simulate the draw process, I used a number generator from www.random.org

  • With Pot A, I generated a random integer 1-8 to distribute the seeded teams to the tops of their respective groups

  • For the remaining Pots, I used the 1-8 range to randomly generate the teams' group, and a 2-4 range to determine their position in said group-- with the aforementioned exception of Northern Ireland, Peru and Uruguay

Here was how the final draw played out:​

The Ramifications

As a result of that group being so absurdly stacked, most others have a pretty clear-cut 1 and 2, at least on the surface. A few of the countries that may be expected to progress with this draw, though, should (hypothetically) be wary.

If the US plays in Russia the way they've been playing recently, I see both Iceland and Northern Ireland playing them level or beating them (*ducks to avoid angry US fans*). The hosts may be expected to beat saudi Arabia, but would almost surely drop points to Croatia, and would likely have their hands full with a talent-laden Nigeria side. England might be expected to break their dry spell of tournament knockout stage success looking at the other names in their group, but if I'm a betting man, I'm actually expecting a ridiculously tough Costa Rica team to progress over the Brits yet again. And finally- though Serbia has played some fine football, I think 2018 will likely be the year the Ivorians finally get over the hump.

Anyways, here's how I see this draw going down:

Quarterfinals

Iceland (!) vs. Belgium

Germany vs. Italy

Argentina vs. Brazil (!!)

France vs. Colombia

Semifinals

Belgium vs. Germany

Brazil vs. France

Final

Germany vs. France

(Spoiler alert for future draws: if possible, all roads would lead to Brazil vs. France for yours truly. Sadly, in this scenario, only a semifinal date would await them).

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