FIFA 2023 WWC qualifiers

While those four UEFA teams are favored over the USA at home, it's worth that USA visiting anyone 2nd-8th would put the two teams within 50pts of each other, which is essentially a toss-up in terms of "expected result" - i.e. the expected result is going to be somewhere close to 0.5 on a 0-to-1 scale. That means risk and reward will be symmetric here.

Since this is a friendly between two top-ten teams, the rating weight is doubled, so that's an increase in both risk and reward. When two teams are essentially evenly matched, you aren't going to lose a negligible amount of points from a loss, and you also aren't poised to gain much from a win, but those values increase as the "match importance" does. Here we'd expect a one-goal victory to ship 9-10 points in either direction, regardless of the victor.

So, for ENG, hosting the USA is a medium-risk, medium-reward affair in terms of possible points shifts. Visiting the USA would be low-risk, high-reward, but not hosting; it's a 200pt swing in the pre-match rating difference if you have the choice between hosting a given opponent or visiting them instead.

 

So ESP needs to make up nearly 20pts overall. Both of ESP's upcoming friendlies are between Top-Ten teams, so these matches will have a 2x multiplier (vs. the 4x multiplier of WCQ matches). With HFA, ESP will be favored over SWE while not favored over USA, but both should still be pretty close (within 30pts or so). If ESP wins both, I would except a gain of 25-30pts*, so there's a good chance of overtaking NED, though a strong-enough NED win over NOR might prevent that; if ESP beats SWE and draws USA, then they'll definitely hope that NOR got some result (preferably a win) against NED. I don't think ESP can guarantee a WC seed on their own either way.

*on those two matches; I haven't estimated already-played matches, but I'm guessing ESP's two WCQ wins and NED's two wins somewhat cancel each other out here...

 

Because of how the playoffs are set up, it's possible to draw the playoffs such that each playoff path + group they're slotted into correctly maximizes as all 6 confed being represented. That is, if you pair playoff path 3 with a group that already has 2 UEFA teams, that combination has 6 confeds from 7 teams, while the other two playoff+group pairings have six teams each, so they can be constructed to not double-count any confed (though one *can* have two UEFA teams, which is almost a necessity for playoff path 1). Doing so removes a fair amount of randomness - I'd say about half? - from the actual playoff draw itself, but it's possible.

I did a couple of example setups about two pages back in this thread, and yeah it's complicated with not quite as much randomness as we might like, but it works. I need to try a sample draw again and see if I can find some freer possibilities...

 

Put another way, TL;DR is that the WC groups that need playoff teams will have 2-3 confederations represented (depending on if UEFA is doubled up already) before the playoff team is added, and each playoff spot will be 3-4 confederations, so as long as you don't pair the 4-team playoff with a group that has 3 confederations already included, you'll never have more than 6 total. Thus it's possible that the draw for the playoffs can be done without forcing any overlaps with their respective WC groups. You're right that it's complicated, but it definitely can work - especially since the playoffs are very evenly distributed between the confederations.