World Cup Qualifier Background

The World Cup will be held in Qatar from November to December 2022. today, 8 groups of 4 teams selected for the World Cup. A common tradition when evaluating groups is to see which of these groups is the most difficult to reach the elimination stage. To reach the elimination stage, you need to be in the top 2 of the group.

Another complicating factor is that there are still 3 teams to decide:

• Wales, Ukraine or Scotland may play in Group B
• Peru, Australia or the United Arab Emirates will be in Group D
• Costa Rica or New Zealand will be in Group E.

Methods of Determining Death Groups

To make this decision, I graded each group based on FIFA’s country rankings, the country’s world rankings, and each country’s score. In the image below, I used the country points ranking. Each group is evaluated based on 3 metrics:

• FIFA average
• FIFA Median
• Average FIFA points for the 3 lowest ranked teams

The mean and median give the typical quality of the teams in the group. However, it may be the case that there is a group with a good team and all but 3 relatively poor teams. In this case, the average score or median may not reflect how easy it is to move forward. For this reason, I also calculated the average FIFA points of the bottom 3 teams.

For this exercise, I initially assumed that the highest-ranked teams (i.e. Wales, Peru and Costa Rica) qualify for the World Cup.

In the baseline scenario, the US is in the death group.

If Wales qualify for the World Cup, the United States will be in the death group (Group B). In this case, none of the 4 teams in Group B are ranked lower than 21st in the world: England (5th), USA (12th), Wales (18th), Iran ( 21). The chart below shows the breakdown of each group of countries based on FIFA points. If I analyze according to FIFA rankings instead of FIFA points, the results are similar.

In this case, the simplest group is group A for all 3 metrics. In fact, group A is the easiest group.

other scenes

With 3 World Cup places still to be decided, there are other scenarios to consider. If Scotland (39th in the World Cup) qualify for Group B instead of Wales, then Group D becomes the death group.

However, if Peru (22) qualifies for its group, Group D is only the group of deaths. However, if Australia (42) or the United Arab Emirates (68) qualify, then Group E or usually is based on the median and average FIFA points of the cohort of deaths; Group G will make claims against the cohort of deaths based on the average FIFA score .

Group E is the death group and the easiest group? ! ? !

Group E is a difficult group with Spain (7), Germany (12), Japan (23) and Costa Rica (31). However, if New Zealand (101) beat Costa Rica in the playoffs, it would be the lowest rated team in the tournament. If Scotland, United Arab Emirates and New Zealand all make it to the World Cup we would have the odd situation that Group E would be the dead group based on FIFA median points, but based on FIFA average points we would have the easiest one Average FIFA points in the group and the lowest 3 teams.

calculate

View my workbook here used for calculation. Feel free to play with it!

World Cup draw (until 1 April 2022).