The World Cup draw is coming on Friday for the Brazil 2014 tournament and the teams getting ready are very nervous and excited and many have already started to speculate about the draw and predictions for groups and some picks for the top spots includes teams like Spain, Portugal, Ecuador, Mexico, the United States, Italy and England as well as France will be waiting to see what groups they end up in.
There are a number of groups that could potentially be "groups of death" as many like to call them, as they could have a number of tough teams as well as rigorous travel, as the Brazil tournament is spread out across the country and the logistics will be a nightmare for some teams. The pots helped to split up teams into four groups before they get put into the actual World Cup groups and the pot format was made so that FIFA could split the teams up evenly and competitively.
The seeded teams for the World Cup are all in the first pot, while Pot 2 has the South American and African teams, while the third pot has the United State and CONCACAF teams and the Asian teams, while the final pot has the European teams and that is where a number of quality teams are right now. The pots aren't exactly even and in the format one of the Euro teams will get moved into pot 2 for the draw and the eight seeded teams in the FIF rankings and Brazil make up the first pot and after those, the rest were placed based on geography and now FIFA has the tough job of putting the teams into eight different World Cup groups.
The draw is being set up so that no more than two teams from Europe will be in the same grouping and the South American teams will be split as well and some teams that could have a very tough draw includes the United States and Russia. In 2010 one of the groups of death had Brazil, Portugal, Ivory Coast and North Korea, while in 2006 the group was Italy, Ghana, Czech Republic and the United States. The European team that gets moved likely will play against either Brazil, Argentina, Colombia or Uruguay and that will be tough and the United States could end up in a draw that has the team travelling up to 9,000 miles for their games.
The full match draw for the World Cup will be coming on Friday and the announcement is at 4 pm GMT.
Check here for the full list of teams in the pots for the draw on Friday.
In other draw news from Reuters.com, Brazilian great Pele will not be taking part in the draw on Friday. Pele will not be taking part in Friday's World Cup draw although he will be in the audience, he said on Wednesday, adding that he was worried about landing Brazil in a difficult group.
"President Dilma (Rousseff) suggested that I represent Brazil when it came to pulling the balls out of the pots, which I've done several times before," Brazilian media quoted the former great Brazil striker as saying at an event in Sao Paulo.
"I preferred to turn down the offer because I wouldn't feel comfortable in picking out balls which are not favorable to Brazil. I won five world titles, two with Santos and three with the national team and I scored more than one thousand goals, so you're right, I'm a cold foot," he said.
(Reuters)
