France up in arms but FIFA get seedings right

Lordy, lordy, run to the hills, the world must be coming to an end.  FIFA have made a sensible decision.  Several sensible decisions, in fact.

Firstly, they decided to refer Thierry Henry’s temporary show of deference to the Irish team by experimenting with gaelic football at the Stade de France to the FIFA disciplinary panel, rather than spout a cobbled-together emotive verdict themselves.

Secondly, they decided to seed the FIFA World Cup draw, which takes place tomorrow, on the basis of the current strength of teams, rather than take into account how teams did in a championship seven and a half years ago with mostly different players.

The FIFA World Rankings have their critics but they are sound, given that they take into account the results of international football matches and nothing else.  There is no prejudice which goes into the system – except, possibly, the notion that competitive matches carry more weight than friendlies, but that is entirely reasonable – only cold, hard statistics.  If France and Portugal wanted to be seeded, they should have won more matches in qualifying rather than limp through the play-offs.

To add to this orgy of enlightened reasoning, FIFA decided that using the current rankings would give an unfair advantage to teams who had play-offs in November over those nations who got the job done in September or October – or even earlier, in the case of the Dutch – and only had friendly engagements three weeks ago.

So we use the October 2009 FIFA World Rankings, which has resulted in Brazil, Spain, Holland, Italy, Germany, Argentina and England being seeded alongside the host nation South Africa, who are placed in Group A and will contest the opening game on 11 June.

This is not to say, though, that FIFA could not have conducted the whole World Cup qualification process better.  For the 2014 preliminaries, surely it is desirable that they make clear before the first ball is kicked on some obscure Pacific island whether the myriad draws will be seeded and on what basis.  So, too, must the process of seeding the finals draw, to take place in December 2013, be set in stone before the qualifying competition.

The uncertainty as to who would be in Pot 1 of tomorrow’s draw has led to another of those confounded conspiracy theories, which exists to the effect that FIFA changed the seeding criterion to the October rankings knowing it would exclude France and thereby ‘punish’ them for their dubious qualification at the Republic of Ireland’s expense.

The genius of the conspiracy theory – and this wackier the allegation, the greater the genius – is that they are almost always inherently incapable of being disproved.  How could FIFA ever show that their intention was not to teach Thierry Henry a lesson when confirming France’s place in Pot 4 alongside such luminaries as Greece, Switzerland and Slovakia?  We must merely take their word for it and that is not difficuly, given that their eventual choice of seeding criterion was eminently sensible.

As usual, the conspiracy theorists have undermined their own argument with hysterical utterances.  Enter Michel Hidalgo, France’s coach of the 1980s: “At the highest level of football, there has to be comprehensive moral justice.”  By this, I presume he means France should have offered Ireland a replay in order to make their qualification fair and just.

On he waffles: “France were world champions in 1998 and runners-up in 2006.  Who made Argentina top seeds?  What have England done, apart from having a league full of foreign players?”  Fabio Capello, had he been there at the time, would presumably have said England have qualified by winning their group, amassing 2.7 points per match as opposed to France’s rather feeble 2.1, and not by needing to cheat their way past Ireland in a play-off.

I have never met Jean-Pierre Escalettes, president of the Fédération Française de Football, but he seems more like my kind of chap.  ”There’s no surprise.  I’d done the calculations and France only had a very small chance of figuring in the first pot.  It was logical that FIFA would use the October rankings.”

This is not France’s first complaint about seeding for an international draw.  Two years ago, they were placed in the bottom pot for the Euro 2008 draw and ended up in the Group of Death, Group C, alongside Holland, Italy and Romania.  Then, exactly the same seeding system was used as for the draws for Euro 2000 and 2004, calculating the points per match in the qualification tournaments both for itself and the previous World Cup.  France, who drew so many matches in that awful 2006 qualifying group with Switzerland, Ireland and Israel, and lost twice to Scotland in the Euro preliminaries, were duly some way down the list.

It is true that France have a stronger recent World Cup pedigree than either England or Argentina – or, for that matter, Holland and Spain – but FIFA have correctly judged that football operates in swift cycles of success and a team’s strength as recently as eighteen months ago is not an accurate indicator of their current prowess.  Indeed, half of the countries at Euro 2008 have not even qualified for this tournament.

If FIFA really want to enrapture us all with their benign thinking, they would announce that, from 2014 onwards, the opening match of the tournament will once again involve the holders – providing they qualify – rather than the hosts, as was the case until 2006.  The opening match needs the narrative of a world champion potentially being knocked off their perch, as were Argentina so memorably in Milan in 1990 and France in 2002 in Seoul.  Home advantage for Germany in the opening fixture last time around was too much of a comfort zone.  The opening fixture should also be a Friday night match, the only game played on the opening day.  Not everybody gets to leave work early on a Friday afternoon.

They might also drop their sudden fixation of abolishing play-offs: this would inevitably end up with New Zealand qualifying almost automatically as the top team from Ocenia since Australia’s ridiculous defection to the Asian confederation.  Indeed, there is an argument for merging Oceania with eastern Asia in qualifying, allowing three qualifying berths, with two given to a separate western Asia campaign.

That would mean New Zealand would have to do more than simply defeat a mid-ranking Asian side like Bahrain to qualify and prevent a repeat of next year’s total lack of an Arab presence at the FIFA World Cup.  Indeed, Algeria are unique in 2010 as being the only predominately muslim nation at the competition, following Bosnia-Herzegovina’s loss to Portugal in their play-off.

The World Cup is not about having the 32 best national teams in the world; it is about having the best teams from all areas of the world.  Asia, particularly its new warped footballing definition, is simply too large and disparate to imagine that Australia ‘represent’ a continent containing Syria, Jordan and Yemen.

Still, I am quibbling.  So let’s look forward to tomorrow’s pow-wow in Cape Town and clutch tightly our World Cup draw spotter’s guide.  Keep an eye out for:

• The colour draining from Marcello Lippi’s face when Italy get one of the Korean teams.

• Jonathan Pearce sucking the air through his teeth in apprehension when Algeria get Germany and reminding us all it was the Algerians who suffered from the Germano-Ausrian anschluss in Gijón in 1982.

• Nervous laughter throughout the Cape Town International Convention Centre as a European power get one of their former colonies: France v Ivory Coast or Algeria; Germany v Cameroon; England v Ghana, South Africa or Nigeria.

• Home delegates trying diplomatically to conceal their glee when South Africa draw New Zealand, Switzerland and Uruguay.

• A brief glimpse of a short man with a thick moustache and comedy large spectacles behind the pages of a large broadsheet and wondering if it is suspended Argentina coach Diego Maradona sneaking in incognito.

• The panicking BBC Two scheduler displaying a caption reading ‘Strictly Come Dancing – It Takes Two will follow the World Cup draw’ as it becomes clear that Sepp Blatter is taking his time over proceedings.