2014 World Cup draw: England, United States get tough assignments

South Korea are an interesting team, and one of the most unrecognizable for fans of European football. The vast majority of their squad is drawn from the Korean domestic league, and could be one of the youngest in the entire tournament. Given how easy Asian qualifying is, it’s difficult to judge how they’ll fare when it comes to the world stage. While they shouldn’t have enough to progress to the knockout stages, they’ll be expecting a win over Algeria.

Before he made the move from Lille to Chelsea last season, Hazard was one of the most sought-after players in the world. This season he’s proving why, with a string of brilliant domestic performances for the Blues. Capable of playmaking through the middle or out wide, he’ll be difficult for any opponent to shut down.

This is about as good of a draw as Iran could have hoped for, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they could grab four points from Nigeria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. They’re a well-organized team that doesn’t give up much in midfield, but unfortunately, they just don’t have the same high-end talent as their two competitors for second place. It seems more likely that they’ll end up with zero points than four, but they’re not to be taken lightly.

Musa has become one of CSKA Moscow’s best players over the last year and has already gotten himself on the radar of some of Europe’s giants. A good World Cup will almost certainly see him subject to bids from the best in Europe’s big four leagues. At just 21 years old, he’s got a lot of room to get better, but he’s already made his mark on his country in his 35 caps, helping them to qualification and an Africa Cup of Nations win.

How did they manage it? Well, either by cleverness or by happy accident the Swiss have managed to profit, relative to those other teams around them, from the peculiarities of FIFA’s ranking system. To wit, in the year preceding October 17 they played slightly less football than everybody else, and were better off as a result.

A simplistic overview. A nation’s ranking is calculated over the course of four years, with significantly more weight applied to the most recent year. Every international ‘A’ game played in a year earns a certain number of points for the teams involved, and those points are averaged across the year. The points for each team vary according to the result, the opponent, the global region, and, importantly, the status of the game. Competitive games are heavily favoured -- in Europe, a team is awarded 2.5 times more points for a competitive fixture than they would be for a friendly -- and this has the slightly-counterintuitive consequence that playing more friendlies in the course of a year can -- in fact, must -- drag down a team’s average. In the final (and most important) year of the ranking period, Switzerland only played three friendlies. Italy, the Netherlands and England played six, five, and five, respectively.

Because there are more than eight European teams, there will be one European team that can be drawn from Pot 2, making it essentially a wildcard team. That could be the team that makes the Group of Death, with a team like the Netherlands or Portugal going to Pot 2 and being drawn with Brazil and Italy, hypothetically.

The pots put the strong teams in Pot 3 at a disadvantage because it is undoubtedly the weakest pot in the draw. Teams like the U.S., Mexico and Japan will not have the opportunity to get Honduras, Costa Rica or Iran in their group, making their groups much more difficult, but FIFA didn’t make much of another choice with the pots. Because CONCACAF and Asia each got four teams into the World Cup, they made for a perfect marriage in an eight-team pot.