Predicting a group with Holland, Germany, Czech Republic, Turkey and another with Portugal, Italy, France and Greece…

This will likely be one of the best draws in the history of the competition, it’s such a shame that England won’t be apart of it…
Can’t wait to see them in Africa..!

Imagine that I used to live in France at some point, and the World Cup swung by in 1998 when I was 16 years old. Not rich enough to afford any tickets (it doesn’t help when your parents, especially your father, doesn’t give a crap about football).

Sigh.

Marco, you going to Austria / Switzerland next summer? Steve, what about you?

Let’s move them all the way up to the 59th.

Dan Leo

PS. FIFA’s rankings have as much reality as the Fed’s inflation data or the official Soviet military casualty reports.

Here, the best “group of death” would see Italy (or France, or Spain, or Netherlands… only top teams in pot 1), Germany, Portugal, Sweden. Even more balanced.

We mustn’t forget however that the reason UEFA are using the UEFA coefficient is to reward a team’s performance during the last qualifying campaign. In other words, a “big football nation” might be ranked lower simply because they have underperformed, despite they have the talent potential to be a tournament winner (like Germany, Portugal, Spain and France, who ended up in the lower two pots).

Also, to answer your last point, here’s what the pots distribution would have looked like if only the UEFA Coefficient had been taken into account:

So in this scenario, the closest we can get to a “group of death” would be Italy (or Netherlands), Germany, France (or Spain), and Russia/Turkey. Much more balanced.

My issue is that since the TWO host nations, and the holders are in Pot 1, that is now one of, if not the weakest pot, defying the point of the whole thing.

Sure, put the hosts in the competition, but should they really be put into the highest ranked pot, spreading the other good teams between pots.

Would the potential ‘Group of Death’ have been possible if ALL the teams had been sorted according to their UEFA coefficient?

France - 1 World Cup, 2 European Championships
Germany - 3 World Cups, 3 European Championships
Italy - 4 World Cups, 1 European Championship
Netherlands - 1 European Championship

This doesn’t even include numerous appearances in the tournament finals .. so that’s 8 World Cup Titles & 7 European Championships between those four teams .. wow !!!

“The system was adapted to football by adding a weighting for the kind of match, an adjustment for the home team advantage, and an adjustment for goal difference in the match result.”

What I like about this system, as compared to FIFA or UEFA, is that rankings are continuously updated after each international game. They also provide a wealth of historical data about your favorite national team. For example, you can see that Italy played France in their first international in 1910, England played Scotland in 1872, and the USA played Canada in 1885, respectively.

In this system, England is presently ranked 9th, Ireland is 32nd, Northern Ireland is 67th, Scotland is 33rd, and Wales is 56th, respectively.

But let’s look at Euro 2008, and how the Elo system (http://www.eloratings.net/) ranks the participants as of 23 November 2007:

Pot 1

Switzerland: 18
Austria: 60
Greece: 16
The Netherlands: 6

Pot 2

Croatia: 11
Italy: 2
Czech Republic: 7
Sweden: 22

Pot 3

Romania: 10
Germany: 7
Portugal: 13
Spain: 5

Pot 4

Poland: 26
France: 4
Turkey: 17
Russia: 24