Guide to the World Cup 2014 draw

A curiously large portion of the global TV audience will, at 11 a.m. ET Friday, be anxiously watching what at first glance might look like a bingo tournament in the Brazilian coastal resort of Costa do Sauipe.

But the pingpong balls that will be pulled from four large bowls don’t represent N-35 or I-19; they represent national soccer teams — and the order in which they’re drawn will have a massive impact on those teams’ prospects for achieving glory at next summer’s FIFA World Cup. Friday’s draw will allocate the 32 qualifiers into eight groups of four that will play each other once. The two in each group that come out of those games with the best records advance to the knockout stages, while the rest go home.

And the process, this time, is nothing if not complicated. 

Each group includes one of eight seeded countries, and one from each of three remaining “pots” designed to ensure a spread of regional competition. No group can contain more than two European teams, or more than one from any other continent. 

But the seeding, based on an arcane formula that somehow privileged teams that played fewer international friendlies, has produced some anomalies.

Most notably, perennial also-ran Switzerland is seeded, but European powerhouses Italy, France and the Netherlands are not. The Swiss (or the immigrants from the Balkans who make up most of their squad) should not be underrated — eventual champion Spain actually lost its group game to Switzerland in 2010. But leaving Italy, France and the Netherlands (all of which made it to the final in either 2010 or 2006) unseeded creates a number of possible “Groups of Death” — that’s World Cup language for groups featuring at least three plausible contenders, raising the stakes for top teams early on and making for more exciting viewing.

That’s not good news for the United States, whose prospects for finishing ahead of both a seeded team and a European powerhouse would be slim.

The seeds do include the current European form teams, first and foremost Belgium. Like Switzerland’s squad, Belgium’s is dominated by immigrants. But unlike the Swiss, the Belgians are very much the team to beat in Europe right now. Ask any English Premiership coach the value of a team featuring the likes of Eden Hazard, Romelu Lukaku, Marouane Fellaini, Kevin De Bruyne, Vincent Kompany, Jan Vertonghen and more.

Then there’s Germany, which may finally be rewarded for its investment in a vibrant counterattacking style to replace the grinding physical game that won it three World Cup titles, the last in 1990. And, of course, reigning champion Spain, which seems to win even when playing well below its best, as it did at Euro 2012.

The remaining four seeds come from the host continent of South America: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia. Brazil and Argentina might seem favorites, but the host nation is under fearsome pressure to bring home the trophy, even if it almost always gets an easy group. Still, with such game-changing talents as Neymar on show and coach Felipe Scolari (who steered the team to its last title) back in charge, the Brazilians ought to get at least to the final. Argentina is a perennial choker — Messi has hardly played a memorable game for his national team — and it would do well to make the final four.

The second "pot" features teams from North and Central America and the Asia-Pacific region — the U.S., Japan, Honduras, Costa Rica, Australia, South Korea, Iran and Mexico. Of those, a contender would want to avoid the U.S. and Japan, both teams on the rise, with most of their top players now based in the elite leagues of Europe. South Korea and Australia are shadows of their best selves — and some might say the same of Mexico these days, although its best is so much better than the rest here. Honduras, Costa Rica and Iran are perennial also-rans unlikely to upset anybody’s plans. But one of the European teams in Pot 4 will be added to this pot at random, potentially further scrambling the probabilities.

The third pot features the five African contenders — Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Algeria — any of which could upset one of the seeds, and the Ivoirians and Ghanaians might even fancy themselves to top a group headed by Switzerland or Colombia. Winning a group hypothetically gives a team an easier task in the first knockout round, when it would face the runner-up of a different group. The third pot also includes Chile, which could spoil any of the top teams' day, and Ecuador — less fancied, but no pushover.

The Netherlands doesn’t figure to be much of a threat, as catastrophic personality divisions perennially hobble it. And as rich as it is in attacking options, its defense is threadbare. Portugal, on the other hand, could reasonably be called a one-man team — but when that one man is Cristiano Ronaldo, that's not necessarily a handicap.

What to say about England? Nearly a half-century has passed since England’s only World Cup title — “30 years of pain,” England fans sang at the Euros in 1996, but the years and decades of pain just keep adding up. And although books have been written on the reasons for the malaise and commissions of inquiry appointed to investigate, the pain is expected to persist for the foreseeable future. Even if some of its players have improved technically through playing alongside more talented foreigners, England's coaching and tactics remain, in the words of the country’s former star striker Gary Lineker, “in the dark ages.”

England players perform far better in teams filled with foreigners than they do playing with one another, and while Wayne Rooney and Steve Gerrard have been known to change games, there are few world-class players in the England setup these days.

You want England in your group.

The same may be true for Russia. Croatia is a serial overachiever, so despite an unimpressive run you don’t want to underestimate a well-drilled unit that features the likes of Real Madrid’s Luka Modric and Bayern Munich’s Mario Mandzukic.

And then there's Bosnia, surely the team every observer of the Balkan wars of the ’90s has to be rooting for. The tiny nation-state is but the latest iteration of the rule that ever since the collapse of Yugoslavia, at least two of its component parts have been represented at every World Cup. There are only three genuine stars in the Bosnia squad — Stoke goalkeeper Asmir Begovic, Manchester City striker Edin Dzeko and Roma attacking midfielder Miralem Pjanic. Still, anyone looking for an underdog to love in Brazil ought to adopt Bosnia.

Greece? Greece’s politics is interesting; its soccer is painfully boring, and won’t be missed when it crashes out. 

Getting the easiest opposition is only one of the challenges in Friday’s draw, however. If your team is unlucky enough to have a game scheduled in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest, it is going to play in blistering heat and near 100 percent humidity; teams scheduled to play a key match in the temperate southern coastal city of Porto Alegre, on the other hand, will have lucked out.

In both cases, of course, the same is true for the opponent. The ball, as the saying goes, is round and rolls both ways.