The 2014 World Cup Draw will be announced on Friday in Brazil and all 32 teams in the tournament are waiting with great expectations about what group they will end up in and after getting split up into four pots, the countries will be split up in a live reading of the draw at 11:00 am/11:30 am ET Costa do Sauipe Resort in Mata de Sao Joao, Bahia and it will be streaming from the WatchESPN website.
Much has been made already about the extensive travel that teams will have between matches and depending on what group certain nations are drawn to, teams could travel over 8,000 miles during the duration of the event. Representatives for all the teams in the World Cup will draw balls for the tournament groups and the pots are split up by rankings and region and that is where the teams will be drawn from for each of the groups in the Cup. The first pot has the host nation in Brazil along with the top ranked teams in FIFA with Spain, Germany, Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Uruguay and Switzerland and those teams will be drawn first into one of eight groups and then the rest of the pots with the other teams will follow.
Check here for the ESPN stream coverage of the World Cup 2014 draw.
The Brazilian team has already been placed in Group A because they are the host nation and the other pots are split up by geography and groups, with Pot 2 teams coming from the unseeded nations from South America and the African qualified teams, while in Pot 3 are from North America and Asia and the last pot 4 has the unseeded teams from Europe and one of those teams will be moved to even things out before the draw, as there are nine in the group. The teams in Pot 1 will get drawn first and then pot 2, which has Ecuador, Chile, Cameroon, Nigeria, Algeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast, will get placed and the groups will not have more than three UEFA teams in the same group.
The third pot has Japan, South Korea, Australia, Honduras, Costa Rica, Mexico, the United States and Iran and they will be next to get placed and then the final pot with the unseeded Euro teams will be placed into the groups. One team will get moved to help with the UEFA bunching and the pot has the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, England, Croatia, France, Greece, Russia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The World Cup has been held in Brazil before back in 1950 and this will be the 20th event and the nation is extremely excited to host it, although it has been beleaguered with problems, including construction issues at some of the stadiums, as well as controversy about the travel schedules teams will have to follow. The draw procedures can be a bit complicated, but FIFA does it this way to keep neighboring teams and ones from the same groupings from playing each other in the early knockout stages and the tournament will be set after the announcement on Friday. Teams are hoping to avoid whatever the "group of death" is and this tournament could be one of the most competitive ever, as all eight of the previous championship teams are in the field and Brazil is extremely motivated to have a deep run.
