World Cup Football 2014 - The Draw - Part 4

High Level Group Reviews.

Group B & F are decided - Spain + Netherlands and Argentina + Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Groups A, C, E & H all have one qualifier (Brazil, Columbia, Switzerland and Belgium) with the 2nd spot coming from one of two teams.

Group D & G can lay claim the the group(s) of death. Both have 3 or 4 strong teams fighting for 2 spots.

Draw of Death

If you read the US press, Group G is the Group of Death. If you read the English press, Group D is the Group of Death. I'm not going to argue with them. However, let me introduce another concept ... 'draw of death'. The 'draw of death' is allocated by assuming you have the power to move your team to any other slot in the draw. Which is the very bottom slot that you want your team to move to! That is the team that got the 'draw of death'. I am going to argue that that team is Australia. They (ranked #59) have to get past Spain (#1), Netherlands (#9) and Chile (#15) to get out of the group phase.

World Cup Football 2014 - The Draw - Part 3

Time to look at how the Relative Opponent Strength Rating goes when you drop it into the 8 groups.

Group A (BRA, CRO, MEX, CMR)
Brazil is green and so it is making it out of the group stage. Cameroon is red and they aren't. Both Croatia and Mexico are in the middle group and that is where the main battle for the 2nd spot will come from. All up, a pretty straight forward group.

Group B (ESP, NED, CHI, AUS)
Spain and Netherlands are green. Australia is red. End of story.

Group C (COL, GRE, CIV, JPN)
This group is similar to A - one team is green (Columbia) and one team is red (Japan). As such, Greece and Cote d'Ivoire will be fighting it out for the 2nd spot.

Group D (URU, CRC, ENG, ITA)
Costa Rica is red - the others (Uruguay, England and Italy) are in the blue group. This will be a tough group to qualify from for all teams.

Group E (SUI, ECU, FRA, HON)
Another A? Switzerland is green, Honduras is red, France and Ecuador are fighting out for the 2nd spot.

Group F (ARG, BIH, IRN, NGA)
This group has two red teams (Iran and Nigeria). As such, the other two will qualify ... Argentina (green) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (blue).

Group G (GER, POR, CHA, USA)
Another Group like D (tough!). Ghana is red - the others (Germany, Portugal and USA) are in the blue group.

Group H (BEL, AGL, RUS, KOR)
A again. Korea is red, Belgium is green, Russia and Algeria are blue and fighting for the 2nd spot.

World Cup Football 2014 - The Draw - Part 2

Part 1 on my posts on the World Cup Draw introduced what I am calling a relative ranking. I've calculated this for all of the 32 teams using their FIFA rankings as well as the FIFA rankings of their opponents in the group stage. Sorting from highest to lowers and then plotting gives me this ...

I've added some color coding to help you see where I have broken the progression. Below -10 is red - the lowest blue value is -3.7 (USA), the next lowest value is -13.0 (NGA). So - I think that is a pretty clear break.

The break for the better teams was a little harder to select - I ended up going with above 15. The value just below 15 is 12.3 (GER) and the value just above 15 is 16.0 (NED).

The teams with red opponent strength ratings aren't making the final 16 (in my opinion). The teams with green opponent strength ratings are making the final 16.

Next, I'll resort these into their groups and look at the various groups in more details.

World Cup Football 2014 - The Draw - Part 1

Today was a big day for most of the nutty sports fans around the world. Yahoo.com only seemed to be interested after the event and only then to say that the USA was in the Group of Death. Yes - I am talking about the World Cup Football 2014 Draw. You should all know the results ... but in case you have been living under a rock (or in the USA), here is a link to FIFA.

Being the actuary that I am, I had to analyze the results based on some sort of ranking.  Lucky for me, I don't have to invent my own ranking ... I can use FIFAs or ESPNs.  After a quick review of ESPNs, I decide that what ever they are using to arrive at their ranking list, one of the ingredient must be illegal ... so FIFAs ranking it is.

Now, using the FIFA rankings, I develop two measures of opponent strength - one absolute and one relative.  Here is an example (using Australia's group) ...

Team	Ranking	Absolute	Relative
ESP	#1	27.7	26.7
NED	#9	25.5	16.0
CHI	#15	23.0	8.0
AUS	#59	8.3	-50.7

How is the absolute strength calculated? Easy - it is the average of the rankings of the three opponents. Aust = (1 + 9 + 15) / 3. A lower score implies that you are playing against tougher opponents. The relative strength is the absolute strength minus your ranking.