twballgame9 {l Wrote}:how they seed these World Cup teams?
How are #8 England and #14 USA the two best teams in one group, while #1 Brazil and #3 Portugal are the two best teams in another? Is there rhyme or reason? Is there a geographical element, such that the two top seeds have to be from different regions? I am perplexed.
I watched the seeding show and it went something like this:
Top 7 teams in the world + host nation go in one bag, and they are drawn, first one drawn in group a, second in group b, etc. If the defending champions had not been in the top 7, it would have been top 6 plus defending champs plus host nation.
Then they have 3 other bags which have different regions associated with them. One is all European teams, one is North America/Central America/Asia/Australia/Islands, the other is South America/Africa. One team is selected from each bag for each group, randomly. Everything possible is done to avoid multiple teams from the same region in the same group. That's unavoidable with Europe, of course, because there are so many teams, but let's say Brazil is chosen for group B and then they pull Paraguay from the Africa/South America bag. Paraguay would instead be placed in group C and they would pull an African team.
So, they protect the top 7 in the world from facing each other, and then it's all random/geographical. This also explains why group A is a bunch of pussies.
Oh, and one final thing. They used the October 2009 rankings for this, so that's why some of the current top 7 are together.