February 16, 2006
Tags: Soccer | Posted by Orion at @ 11:02 am
[Ed. note: For those of you wondering just what Orion’s talking about with all these bizarre acronyms, we refer you back to his column from last week where he clearly spells it all out for you in such exquisite detail that even most members of the Bush Administration could understand it.]
Qualification for the World Cup is a long, arduous process. At the top, FIFA figures out (by using some mystic formula, which really translates to magically waving their hands) how many of the 32 available qualification spots to dole out to each confederation. Confederations then get to figure out their own qualifying tournament or tournaments, crown the right number of champions, and send them on to the Final Draw.
Let’s take CONCACAF as an example. There were 34 teams battling it out for 3.5 spots in the Finals (more later on what “half a spot” means). CONCACAF qualifying takes two years (it started in February of 2004, this time around) and goes through four rounds. The first round pits most of the smaller teams against each other — the teams that made it (or almost made it) to the World Cup last time don’t come in until Round Two. Round One is a two-game home-and-away playoff (this is commonly known as the “cup” format), so 22 teams are whittled down to 12 (there are a couple of byes thrown in). Round Two matches up the remaining 12 teams against the 12 winners from Round One, and is also a two-game playoff.
Now things get more interesting. The 12 winners from Round Two are broken into three pools of four. Within each pool, every team plays each other twice (once home, once away) in a round-robin format. The top two teams from each pool advance to Round Four, which is often known as “The Hexagonal” (because there are six teams). Round Four is again a round-robin home-and-away (sometimes called “league” format) tournament, and at the end of the day the teams are ranked and spots at the Finals are handed out.
The Wikipedia page on CONCACAF qualifying describes all of this as well, and if you’re as anal-retentive about following the exact results of each game as I am, you can see all the qualifying matches there. I’ll wait here while the OCD folks in the audience check that page out…
Oh, and by the way, don’t pay too much attention to anything I just wrote, because when qualification for 2010 starts up, the format is likely to be completely different (except for the Hexagonal, which is pretty constant.) Such is the life of an international soccer fan.
So what’s the deal with getting 3.5 spots? Well, of the six teams in Round Four, the top three (USA, Mexico, and Costa Rica) are automatically granted passage to the World Cup. The fourth-place team might make it, but they have to play another “cup” format round against a “half spot” from some other confederation. In 2005 the half-spot playoffs were between CONCACAF and AFC, and between CONMEBOL and OFC. Trinidad and Tobago (4th place CONCACAF) defeated Bahrain (5th place AFC) in October, winning 2-1 “on aggregate.” In the other playoff, Australia (1st place OFC) defeated Uruguay (5th place CONMEBOL) on penalty kicks after each team won their home game 1-0.
Okay. Every confederation has filled its allocations, the half-spot playoffs have been held, and we know all 32 teams that are going to the World Cup. (By the way, here’s this year’s breakdown: UEFA 14 (including Germany, who automatically qualify as host), CAF 5, CONMEBOL 4.5 4, OFC 0.5 1, AFC 4.5 4, CONCACAF 3.5 4) Now what?
Now we come to the mystical process known as the Final Draw. The first thing that happens is that FIFA decides who the “ranked” teams are. There are eight pools, so there are eight ranked teams. Germany (host) and Brazil (defending champion) are automatically ranked, and placed in the pools that give them the largest stadia to play in (I’m not making that up). The remaining six ranked spots go to the teams that fared the best at World Cup 2002, World Cup 1998, and the World Rankings in 2005, 2004, and 2003. Again, there is theoretically a mathematical formula that one could follow to get these rankings, but there’s always so much press and controversy around the rankings that you wonder whether people inside FIFA are pulling strings to give certain teams more or less than they deserve.
Okay, now we know who the ranked teams are. They go into Slot 1 of each of the eight pools, so none of them has to play any other until the second round. The rest of the slots are drawn out of “pots” full of little balls that have each country’s name written on them. Teams are divided into pots mostly based on confederation, so that two teams from the same confederation don’t have to play each other in the first round. (The exception is UEFA, which has so many slots that it would be impossible to prevent that.) If you want to know all the nitty-gritty details (and they are described in excruciating detail), there’s a PDF file on the World Cup home page (look for “Final Draw” in the navbar) that you can go read. Basically, they draw balls from the pots in some specific order that fills in the groups, while millions of people watch breathlessly and hope their team doesn’t get totally shafted.
Yep, that’s right, this whole process is broadcast live on TV around the world, and at last count something like 350 million people watched it. (I followed the webcast in a cute little Java applet that didn’t refresh quickly enough.) 11,000 people were in the auditorium where the draw happened. Heidi Klum was on hand to assist. Take all the pomp and circumstance around something like the Emmys, multiply it by a couple orders of magnitude, and make it about soccer. You start to get the idea. Oh, and by the way, the USA got shafted, by which I mean they got drawn into one of the hardest groups.
From here it looks pretty simple. The first round of the World Cup Finals is made up of eight pools of four teams each, played in single round-robin (’cause there’s no such thing as “home” and “away”, here). The top two teams from each pool advance. Then a 16-team playoff bracket decides the World Cup Champion, who gets to carry the 18-karat gold World Cup Trophy around for four years.
But first, you have to qualify.
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February 12, 2006
Tags: NFL | Posted by Allen at @ 10:25 pm
Last year, I came out with my unrealistcally early predicitions for the 2005 NFL season — right after the Super Bowl, before free agency, before the draft. The Patriots’ fingerprints hadn’t even been wiped off of the Lombardi Trophy before I confidently stated that the Eagles would defeat the Ravens in Super Boxl XL. Of course, neither team as much as caught a whiff of the playoff chase; neither did five of the other teams I predicted still to be around in the postseason. The Lions? The Cardinals? The friggin’ Packers? Yeah, big genius, me.
Not that last year’s pathetic failure is going to stop me from making just a big of an ass of myself this year.
Remember, these predictions are before any of the major personnel moves to come over the next few months, though coaching hires are certainly taken into account. Also remember, these are not my official predictions, which won’t be released until late August. I certainly wouldn’t recommend you wager even a single dollar based on the information I’m about to provide. Caveats aside, away we go:
AFC East: Patriots
AFC North: Bengals
AFC South: Colts
AFC West: Chargers
Wild Cards: Dolphins, Broncos
NFC East: Redskins
NFC North: Bears
NFC South: Panthers
NFC West: Seahawks
Wild Cards: Eagles, Buccaneers
AFC Championship: Patriots over Colts (yes, again)
NFC Championship: Redskins over Seahawks
Super Bowl XLI: PATRIOTS over Redskins
So there you have it: a Super Bowl matchup guaranteed to strain the friendship between me and fellow Sportsgeek (and lifelong ‘Skins fan) Timmy B. Also notice that I’m predicting the Steelers to follow the recent trend of Super Bowl champs failing to make the playoffs the next year — their schedule is ridiculously tough next year, so I’m saying the barely miss out.
Feel free to check back next February and mock me mercilessly.
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February 10, 2006
Tags: Soccer | Posted by Orion at @ 1:49 pm
Okay, so, I’m led to believe that many of you diehard SportsGeekz readers (all five or six of you) are missing some important background information when it comes to the world of soccer. Sure, everyone’s heard of the World Cup, but when I start throwing around acronyms like CONCACAF, people’s heads start to spin. And understandably so. So as a public service effort, I’ll spend the next couple of weeks (between Road to the World Cup posts) filling in some of the gaps in your soccer education.
We’re focusing on the World Cup here, so today I’ll talk about the political structure of the international game: the governing bodies, who controls what, who’s the best and who’s scraping the bottom. I’ll also define a bunch of those acronyms for you, so that in the future when I say that the president of UEFA stuck a banana up FIFA’s tailpipe you’ll know that it’s a pretty big deal.
Now, you may have already figured out that just about every country out there (205 of them, as of the latest rankings) has its own soccer “federation,” or national governing body. (U.S. Soccer is ours.) The national federations are grouped by geography into continental “confederations,” of which there are six:
CONCACAF (Confederation Of North and Central American and Caribbean Association Football, pronounced [KON-ka-kaff]), covering… well, just like it says. (Yes, I typed that from memory. No, don’t make me type it again.)
CONMEBOL (Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol – it’s not much of an acronym, I’m afraid, but it’s pronounced [KON-meh-bowl]), covering South America.
UEFA (Union of European Football Associations, pronounced [yoo-AY-fah]), covering all of Europe and some Asia-bordering teams.
AFC (Asian Football Confederation), covering most of Asia and the Middle East.
OFC (Oceania Football Confederation), covering the Pacific islands.
CAF (Confédération Africaine de Football), covering Africa.
The overarching international governing body is called FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association, pronounced [FEE-fah]), is headquartered in Switzerland, and runs the whole show from the top down. Which is not to say that there’s never any conflict between FIFA and the confederations, or between confederations and national federations, or even between federations and the pro leagues that run in the same country. Quite the opposite — and it usually makes for some entertaining press, although it also devolves into a lot of wanking from people who make a bigger deal out of themselves than they ought to.
*cough* Um, but I digress.
UEFA is generally considered the powerhouse of the game; as well it should, since the sport was invented in England, and 13 of the top 20 teams are European (as of the January ‘06 world rankings). However, CONMEBOL teams have won more World Cups (nine to UEFA’s eight), as well as hosting the country that has won the most World Cups on its own (Brazil, with five). It might be more accurate to say that UEFA is the political powerhouse of the game, since it seems to me that UEFA often dictates policy to FIFA, who occasionally put up some token resistance that usually doesn’t last very long.
Apart from the top two, the power rankings get a little more murky. CONCACAF only has a couple of good teams at all, but the USA and Mexico are currently tied for 7th in the rankings (ahead of England — ssh!). Costa Rica barely misses at 21st, but you have to go down to 50th to find the next CONCACAF team (Trinidad and Tobago), and it gets worse from there. I’ll let my home team bias show through and declare that CONCACAF takes the third spot, even though FIFA still only gives us 3.5 qualifying slots to the World Cup (more on that next time).
The AFC and CAF haven’t traditionally featured prominently in either the world rankings or at the World Cup, but they’ve also definitely been on the upswing in the last decade or so. One need only look at South Korea’s semifinal run in the 2002 World Cup to see the progress that they’re making. African teams, by contrast, often show a lot of promise but inevitably falter in the highest levels of competition.
The OFC stands out as the worst confederation by far, especially in light of the recent decision by FIFA to allow Australia (historically the only halfway decent team in the OFC) to move to the Asian confederation instead. This was done for the sake of parity, since Australia will have much more reasonable competition in the AFC than they did in Oceana, but look for no OFC teams at all to ever make it to the World Cup again. Unless New Zealand (currently tops, at 121st) decides to adopt a liberal policy of granting citizenships to really good soccer players.
It’s worth mentioning here that the FIFA World Rankings really are the product of a mathematical formula, and have nothing to do with politics. I could explain the whole thing to you, but you probably don’t care; suffice to say that a team gains points when they win and loses points when they lose, games that are more important (like World Cup matches) are worth more points, and recent games count more than games played a year ago.
Next time I’ll cover the World Cup qualification process. It’s long, arduous, grueling, and tests your mettle – and I’m talking about being a fan of the process. I can only image what the players must go through. In the meanwhile, if you’ve got burning questions, feel free to comment on this post or send an email to orion at sportsgeekz.com, and I’ll get to them in a future post.
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Tags: Miscellaneous, Columns | Posted by Timmy B at @ 9:37 am
We would be remiss in our geekly duties if we did not recognize today’s notable birthdays.
Happy Birthday, Houston Astros outfielder Lance Berkman.
And Happy Birthday to you, golfer/strangulation survivor Greg Norman.
And Olympic legend Mark Spitz? Step up and celebrate, too.
Oh, yeah, and it’s Allen’s birthday, too. He doesn’t have a Green Jacket, or any Olympic gold medals (though if they ever ratify typing as an Olympic event, he’s in there), but he was born on this day just the same. Hopefully, his three lovely ladies will help him ring it in style.
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February 7, 2006
Tags: NFL | Posted by Allen at @ 12:03 am
I never thought I’d say this about a Super Bowl in which a team I had an actual rooting interest was playing, but… holy schnikies, that was easily the worst Super Bowl I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen every Super Bowl since Niners-Dolphins after the ‘84 season (except for Broncos-Packers, when I had to fucking work during the game (but which remains the only Super Bowl for which I correctly guessed the exact score beforehand)), and I can’t remember any that was even close to that terrible. Even the blowouts had some memorable moments in them, but this one… eh. From top to bottom, pre-game to halftime to post-game to the game itself, that thing was just abysmal.
And if we’re going to be using the word “abysmal,” let’s start by applying that word to the officiating, shall we? Seems a fair place to begin. I’ll state up front that yeah, I’m a Seahawks fan, so of course I’m more than a little tweaked by some of those calls. But I also want to say up front that I’m not blaming the entirety of the Seattle loss on the refs: the officials certainly contributed, but the Seahawks did plenty to lose the game on their own. And to make sure you don’t think I’m slighting Pittsburgh when I say that, I’ll say that none of the bogus calls were on the big plays that won the game for the Steelers. Those plays Seattle blew all on their own.
But c’mon, refs… that was not pass interference on Darrell Jackson in the end zone. Should’ve been six points. The ball did not cross the goal line on Ben Roethlisberger’s “touchdown” (though there certainly wasn’t enough visual evidence to overturn the shoddy call on the field, a call the ref wasn’t even going to make at first). Should’ve been six fewer (or at the least three fewer, assuming they’d have gone for the field goal on the next play) for Pittsburgh. That was not holding on Sean Locklear — should’ve been first and goal from the one for Seattle, a situation which quite probably would have led to their taking the lead. And on the very next play, Pittsburgh was clearly offsides, blatantly offsides on the sack of Matt Hasselbeck. No flag.
I was honestly surprised the Hasselbeck fumble in the fourth quarter was overturned. There must not even have been any obscure little tidbits tucked away in the deepest recesses of the rule book they could use to justify giving the ball to Pittsburgh on that one. But I’m sure they tried.
Again, credit goes to the Steelers: Pittsburgh did what they had to do, they made the big plays when they had to — the third-and-28 completion to Hines Ward, Willie Parker’s 75-yard run, the Randle El-to-Ward touchdown — and the Seahawks didn’t. But the officiating was very, very clearly in Pittsburgh’s favor. I’ve never been one to feel that the NFL has ever rigged their games, but I’m starting to doubt after these playoffs. The Patriots-Broncos game which was practically gift-wrapped for Denver, the Colts-Steelers game the refs desperately tried to give to Indy… the smell of something fishy’s coming from the direction of Paul Tagliabue’s office, if you ask me.
(Think about it for a minute — if someone were going to try to fix a game, whether it be the NFL trying to promote certain teams and stars over others or whether gamblers somehow got on the inside, you know you’re not going to get to the players. Those guys make too much money, they’ve got too much professional pride, and rarely can one player determine the outcome of the game by himself, especially not without being horribly obvious. But if you got to the refs? Yeah, there’s no guarantee that they could swing the game one way or the other, but they most certainly can influence the direction the game takes. Just like they did Sunday night.)
The officiating wasn’t the only stinkbomb laid in Detroit last night, either. The production by ABC Sports was absolutely amateurish. From not following Jerome Bettis out of the tunnel — when his teammates specifically let him go first to get him that moment in the spotlight — to the absolutely incomprehensible decision not to show any fucking game statistics, it was balls-out horrid. Awful pregame (I love you, Stevie Wonder, but leave your family offstage next time, OK? And hey, Aaron, Aretha, Dr. John — were the three of you all playing the same song? ‘Cause I really couldn’t tell. (Line of the night goes to my buddy Mike: “Holy god, who ate Aretha?!”)), awful halftime. Just terrible. I’m glad this will be the last time for the forseeable future that ABC will have the rights to the Super Bowl.
My boss at work made a valid point today: compare this year’s game and telecast to the Patriots-Rams game from four years ago. Fantastic game which featured a double-digit underdog winning the game on a last-second field goal; U2 playing a nearly transcendent set at halftime. Thinking about that game makes this one suck even more when you put them side by side.
Let’s get back to that no-stats thing for just a moment… I realize that the Super Bowl isn’t really for the football fans anymore and hasn’t been for a long time. But hey, NFL and ABC — you do realize that there are still plenty of us who’re watching for the game and not just for the commercials, right? (More suck: what a disappointing batch of ads overall. Very few were even mildly entertaining.) When the game was over, I had no idea who was going to be named MVP, largely because I didn’t have any numeric yardstick to base my guess on. I talked to Timmy B. after the game and he clued me in to the fact that Hines Ward had 120 yards along with his touchdown — I had no idea. Nor did I realize that Hasselbeck threw the ball 49 times for almost 300 yards. Or that Shaun Alexander had almost 100 yards. Or that Roethlisberger had a passer rating of 22 — the only stat I remember seeing during the entire game was midway through the second when they showed Big Ben’s QB rating of zero. After that? Nothin’. Would it really have distracted viewers from the commercials that much to toss us a statistical bone occasionally?
The travesty about the Supbar Bowl was that it came on the heels of what had been a pretty exciting season to date. That game’s going to leave a bad taste in my mouth for a long time… well, OK, until the free agency period starts in three weeks. And of course, then we’ve got the draft to look forward to…
(The really infuriating thing? Knowing with absolute certainty while watching that game that the Patriots would have decimated either one of those teams the way they were playing yesterday. Grr.)