World Cup Final Draw procedure approved

Cape Town – Cape Town is awash with activity this week as the city prepares to host the 2010 Fifa World Cup Final Draw on Friday with thousands of delegates expected to descend on its shores for the event.

To get the ball rolling for the highly anticipated event, the Fifa Organising Committee on Wednesday approved the procedure for the Draw, which will be held in here on Friday 4 December.

The seeding was based on the October 2009 Fifa/Coca-Cola World Ranking and Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Argentina and England are therefore the seven squads that join host South Africa as seeded teams for the final draw.

The Final Draw is the last major event before the hosting of the World Cup in June 2010.

The committee also approved the composition of the other pots as well as the procedure for the final draw:

• Pot 2 will be composed of teams from Asia (Australia, Japan, Korea DPR, Korea Republic),  North, Central America and the Caribbean (Honduras, Mexico, USA) and Oceania (New Zealand)

• Pot 3 will include teams from Africa (Algeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria) and South America (Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay)

• Pot 4 will have the remaining European teams (Denmark, France, Greece, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland)

• Hosts South Africa will be automatically positioned as A1; the other seeded teams will be drawn into the other groups B-H, but will always be in position “1” of their group

• Groups will be drawn from A to H and the positions in the group will be drawn for Pots 2 to 4

• Geographical criteria will also be respected, meaning that no two teams from the same confederation will be drawn in the same group (except European teams, where a maximum of two will be in a group).

For example, South Africa cannot play the African teams from Pot 3 and Argentina and Brazil cannot be drawn against the three remaining South American teams.

Information on the procedure of the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking can be found here: http://www.fifa.com/worldfootball/ranking/procedure/men.html