It's an advantage, but avoiding Italy, Germany, Spain, Holland etc. is a bigger advantage than avoiding Sweden, Romania, Poland, Turkey, etc. Especially since only 1 team qualifies directly. You've gone away from the whole point of this sub-debate. Which is that seeding helps top seeds more than pot B, C, D teams. Whether seeding helps Pot B teams more than an open draw helps would-be Pot B teams is irrelevant.
So you think an open draw and a seeded draw amounts to pretty much the same thing? Fair enough, I just thought the below suggested otherwise. Fair enough-but this all goes back to my original point; in my opinion the vantages are minor and overrated. I do believe that France and co. deserve a 'second chance' and any small benefits going based on ranking, past performance etc. and I'll leave it at that. When you say prose, you mean poetry; best consult a dictionary cmedina, before your next post -of stinking compost.
For crying out loud, obviously not. Just because I say something doesn't give a team "any more of an advantage" than something, it doesn't mean they're the same. An open draw obviously has countless permutations, the worst case scenario of which would place the highest six seeds in one group and the lowest six in another, essentially making the qualifying campaign pointless. The fact is, Pot A teams are given a balanced group that they would be favourites to win. It's designed that way. If anything, the decision to have one Pot A, C, D team, etc, is a situation that further assists the top seed because it defines that they don't have more than one 10-18 ranked team in their group. The advantages are the strongest available and if the seeding is truly accurate, most of the group would struggle to beat you. The biggest "danger" for the top seeds is if the lowest ranked gets one of the highest ranked Pot Bs, but even then the odds are against it. And if it did happen, considering that the teams were closely ranked, a second place for the higher seed might be appropriate to both teams quality. I also don't think France and co deserve a 'second chance', because seeding should be used to assign teams based what happened previously at the start of the contest. Once a competitive phase has been initiated and all teams have entered, IMO seeding should be left outside consideration and competitive merit in the current contest used to define success. Look at it this way: In the Coca Cola Championships, if Cardiff finish third and Newcastle finish sixth, they will meet in the playoffs based on league position. Nobody looks back at Newcastles superior four-year record and seeds them. Nor should they. A more poignant example is the Champions League. The original groups are seeded but after that, if Rubin Kazan finish first in their group and Barca finish second, they will face a group runner-up and winner respectively. They don't reseed based on the UEFA coefficient. If Barca get Chelsea and Rubin get Besiktas as a result, so be it. After that the whole thing is drawn randomly. For the last time: I get why they seed, I understand the theory, but the fact that a team that has played potentially as well and as hard as another, should be defined as less worthy than them of entering the main tournament, is wrong in my book.
Ah, not strictly true. Terrible analogy. The Coca Cola championship? Poor, but not terrible, analogy. CL=WC CLQ=WCQ One that can be thrown back in your face: If a French club finishes third in the French league and an English club finishes third in the English league, only one has to qualify for the Champions League group stages...because of past results. Regardless, we have argued back and forth forever...best let the play-offs do the talking now.
The whole argument of the contra-seeding-side seems to be that France & Co don't "deserve" to be "rewarded". But seeding is not a reward. Seeding is a method to avoid having the strongest teams knocking each other out, while at the same time relatively weaker teams face each other. It is used - rightfully so - at every draw in qualifying to minimze the effect of lucky draws and to have the best teams possible in the finals. The problem with seeding is obviously that there is no perfect way to evaluate team strength - if there were, we wouldn't need the whole qualification in the first place. The FIFA ranking is not very good, but better than nothing. I mean, at this point, is there anyone that honestly believes that Russia, France and Portugal are not the 3 strongest nations in the UEFA playoffs? Does EURO semifinalist Russia "deserve" to be drawn against Portugal or France just because they failed to beat the WC 3rd and EURO 2nd Germany, while at the same time Bosnia can reach the World Cup by beating Belgium in the group and Slovenia in the playoffs, when none of those 3 have even qualified for either the last EURO or the last World Cup? That is the situation that seeding is supposed to avoid, and it does, even using the sub-par FIFA rankings.
We are not talking about the world cup (where there is less seeding than the CL), we are talking about qualification. And every round of CL qualification is seeded, and the seeding in the qualification never even takes into account the results of the previous round - It didn't matter at all that Timisoara kicked the much-higher seeded Shakhtar out, Timisoara was unseeded in the last round.
So why not reseed after the group stages at the World Cup? And then again after the round of 16? You could ensure balanced matchups all the way to the final. There has to be a limit. Teams were seeded for the group stage - by failing to win their groups they pay the penalty of potentially having to face a strong team in the next round. That's life. If they were going to seed by anything, they should have seeded by how well they finished in the group stage. FIFA rankings have little relevance to what has happened in the previous stages of this tournament, which is what matters. Imagine the outcry if the second round of the World Cup wasn't played as Group Winner vs Group Runner Up, but instead all the places were spilled and reseeded based on world rankings.
I'm going to go with "because it would be a logistical nightmare" as the most likely reason. There's a whole month between the last UEFA matches and the playoffs. This argument is a bit of a strawman because of this. This is the best argument against seeding. There isn't a clinching argument that you SHOULD be seeding - but then that doesn't really mean you SHOULDN'T. The main argument against this is that it is against the published rules for the qualification. If they seed, they have to use FIFA ranks - and they actually forced CAF to change their announced qualification rules as a result (although, they let the AFC out of that so it obviously isn't a hard and fast rule for everybody). If we had done it in last world cup I suggest there wouldn't be much of an outcry at all. J
Logistics aren't the main reason. You don't have a coherent sporting tournament if you keep moving the goalposts all the time. Which is why even tournaments that DO have the time between rounds to make this logistically feasible (like tennis's Davis Cup) don't do it. Based on what? The fact that most of the group winners would have been seeded under such a system anyway? You'd have still had plenty of complaints, but I guess if they're not from the top few nations it doesn't matter.
What is the main reason for the way the World Cup schedule is done then? The David Cup works like it does because that's common practice in tennis - you make a draw and that's it for the whole tournament. It's really only "moving" the goalposts if you change something - and I'd need you to explain what has been changed here. If I recall correctly (and there's every reason I don't), the Stanley Cup reseeds the play-offs after each round - with little time in between. Why? Because that's what they do. It's not "right" or "wrong" - it's practice. Honestly, bringing up other sports that happen to do what you like isn't going to get you very far because there is an example for almost anything if you bother to look hard enough. No, again, if it was past practice why would people start complaining? If they decided to seed the FA Cup draw there would be a huge outcry. If the FA Cup had always been seeded there would be no comment at all. J
Sort of. But these are finals tournaments - you're giving an advantage that has been earned over an entire season of competition. It is a somewhat different situation. I guess I don't consider past practice to be a good enough justification. You have a prior round within the same tournament where all teams have performed identically. One set of teams is given an advantage over the other set of teams. That does not seem appropriate.
A whole lot of people (not me though) do believe that Portugal will be knocked out by Bosnia, which suggests they do not believe that Portugal is that good. But, in any case, aside from this cycle, there is always a chance that teams with higher seeding are not the best teams in the play-offs. In that case, just imagine that the seeding process just might match the two strongest teams, one of which was unseeded for various reasons.
Blatter is quoted in the Guardian today as saying that FIFA probably should have announced the seeding of the qualifiers and that they regret that they didn't, and that the process wasn't entirely clear not even to themselves. I mean what more proof do you want that they're just making this up as they go along! The man admits it himself. No matter what camp you're in, SURELY you can agree that these things should be determined before the group stages and not left to the powers that be to decide on last minute at will.
I agree -- but I can't say I was surprised by the seeding. Look, I'm telling you right now, the UEFA qualifying playoffs for the 2014 World Cup will be seeded. UEFA and FIFA may not announce it until October 2013, but you can console yourself four years from now by remembering "Dr. Gamera told me that's how it would be, way back in October 2009."
What I don't get is why people were so surprised? They have done the exact same thing the past two World Cup qualifying campaigns. And now all of a sudden people are outraged that Fifa didn't say anything. What did you expect them to change their procedure all of a sudden and not protect the big teams.
Personally I'm not surprised that FIFA did this, I just find it annoying how they shift the goalposts in the middle of the game.
I think the whole point was the the UEFA Champions League DON'T do this. They have a draw after the groups - that was the original point. The other two are right (well, I suppose MLS is right, I'll take your word for it). J
I just find it baffling that multi-billion dollar industry is managed in an ad hoc manner. Only in football.
If we were talking about the World Cup you be 100% correct. Unfortunately, this isn't the case when it comes to qualifying. UEFA chief concern isn't "fairness." UEFA only interest is ensuring that the best 13 represent Europe in the World Cup. Europeans already complain that they do not have enough allocation of places. Imagine, if less than the best represent and perform poorly. If they do not like the allocation now, wait until a few bad showing in the World Cup. If the "weaker" sides are truly better anyway, then its a mute point. For me the only valid argument I have read in this entire thread is the person(s) who stated that regardless of the system, it needed to be stated from the beginning not in the middle. Pike
What's 'unfair' if the best 13 teams represent UEFA? In my opinion it's rather 'unfair', if a better team has to stay at home because of the group compositions. One of us seems to have a strange definition of 'unfair'.
At this point, that is true. Now that UEFA has its eight playoff teams, the political and financial considerations are a wash: everybody got to participate in UEFA qualifying, everybody got just the right number of fixtures (and nothing about the playoff draw will change the number of fixtures for any team), and no playoff draw is going to make a particularly larger amount of money for UEFA that would offset the potential financial loss from having a weaker team qualify to the World Cup. So, finally, UEFA cares about ensuring that its best four playoff teams qualify. However, ensuring that its best 13 teams qualify to the World Cup has certainly not been UEFA's only interest through the duration of the qualifying process.
If that were true UEFA wouldn't have playoffs for 4 spots and wouldn't have minnows like San Marino in the final group stage of qualifying.
"unfair" is an unseeded playoffs, a random draw, that Bosnia can be matched up against Slovenia while France is drawn against Portugal. So one of Bosnia and Slovenia will make it while one of France and Portugal will sit out. In the current setup, at least we know both France and Portugal can make it.