I suppose it’s a good World Cup draw when no fewer than 3 of the 8 groups are claimed to be the “Group of Death”. There seems to be a strong tendency for a reporter, in say the US, to claim the US is in the group of death and the Australian papers to claim the Socceroos are in the group of death- most everybody else reckons it’s the Group C with Argentina, Holland, Serbia and Montenegro and Ivory Coast.

A poll at the fifa website has some interesting results- in all languages Group C is the group of death (53%) but the Spanish and French speaking voters are more adamant- 71% and 66% respectively. Overall, in second place is Group E 20% and third Group F 10%. Only 3% of Germans think Germany is in the most difficult group (what are they on?) and rightly so.

So what does an impartial look at FIFA’s rankings tell us?

World Cup 2006- Seed Rankings

Fifa did a marvellous job of seeding the teams for the World Cup- marvellous because it gave them their desired result and was so complicated it was essentially impervious to scrutiny. To recap- the average ranking from the last two world cups were added to the average ranking of Nov ‘05, Dec ‘03 and Dec ‘04.
So the Group of Death according to Fifa is… Group F- Funnily enough it only seems to be the Australian press who agrees with these sentiments- though they have some merit. Brazil qualifies then you have 3 fairly even teams (Croatia (unbeaten in qualifiers), Japan and Australia) who will have a tough fight for the remaining spot.

World Cup 2006- ‘03, ‘04 and ‘05 World Rankings

So, World rankings are very complicated and this system has been in place since 1999.
In essence: all international-A match over last 8 years are counted (though the longer they are away in time the less weight). The points for a match are given based on:

• Winning, drawing and losing
• Number of goals
• Home or away match
• Importance of the match (multiplication factor)
• Regional strength (multiplication factor)

Only the seven best results for each team are given full weighting…. anyway- there is a lot more to it and no one really understands it fully.
So the groups of death based on the ‘05 rankings is: Group E (’04: Group C, ‘03: Group A, Avg: Group E with Group A 2nd).

Yep, you heard right- Italy (12), USA (8), Ghana(50) and Czech Republic(2). Only the Americans pick for the Group of Death. Don’t blame me- blame the stupid world ranking system.

Conclusions: it’s all crap!

I suppose the one thing agreed upon is that group G is the easiest group- France, Switzerland, Korea and Togo.

I’ll try and find the odds for the world cup prior to the draw and see who they predict as the ‘Group of Death’.

The central conclusions are: the ‘Group of Death’ is in the eye of the beholder; World rankings are crap; Fifa’s Seedings are crap.

Here is some highly informed discussion of the group of death:

Group C
Group F
Group E
More on who is the group of death