Final Seeds Revealed for World Cup Draw

There's a good reason that the scheduling and seeding for the World Cup feels a lot like a late-night lottery drawing, where the numbers are vacuumed out of a large hopper. On Friday FIFA executives -- along with celebs like Charlize Theron -- will literally pull the names of the 32 participating countries out of four pots to determine the eight, four-team groups for next June's tournament in South Africa.

Wednesday -- two days before the actual draw -- FIFA shed a little light on the process by divulging the top eight seeds for the draw. Hosts South Africa, an outlier in the FIFA rankings, joins Brazil, Spain, Argentina, Italy, Germany, England and the Netherlands in "Pot 1."

Interestingly enough, FIFA decided to use the rankings from October, as opposed to November, meaning Portugal and France -- each UEFA playoff winners and potential No. 1 seeds -- move into "Pot 4" with the six remaining European countries.

This sets up a potential situation where one of the groups would be loaded with a top-seed (not counting South Africa) and France or Portugal. At the very least one of the top seven will be drawn in with one of the two UEFA outliers.

The other significant development from the seeding is that FIFA determined that teams from CONCACAF were more in line with the Asian qualifiers than teams from Africa or South America. This could be a good or bad break for the U.S. and Mexico, which are both nearly 60 points higher in the FIFA rankings than New Zealand and North Korea. More likely, it affects the other 28 teams in the draw who instead of landing one of the two genuine cupcakes in the draw, will get a team if not for a couple bounces of the ball may have been among the No. 1 seeds.

A group featuring the seven top seeds, the U.S./Mexico and France/Portugal would clearly take the 2010 "Group of Death" honors and that's not even taking into considering Pot 3, which is stacked.

Pot 3, featuring Africa and South America, is absolutely loaded with all teams within the FIFA top 37. To prove the fallacy, or at least unreliability of the FIFA rankings, Algeria which last previously made the World Cup in 1986 is ranked No. 28, while Ghana -- which made the knockout stags in 2006 -- is only ranked No. 37. Either way, there aren't any pushovers in Pot 3 as the five African qualifiers and three remaining South American team are all strong.

Between now and the actual draw on Friday there are enough permutations to drive a mathematician insane.

Count that double for fans in the 32 participating nations, who's hopes and dreams for the last three years come down, to some degree, the luck of the draw.

Pot 1 (seeds): South Africa, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Spain, England, Holland, Argentina.

Pot 2 (Asia, Oceania and North/Central America): Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Mexico, Honduras.

Pot 3 (Africa and South America): Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Algeria, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay.

Pot 4 (Europe): France, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, Greece, Serbia, Denmark, Slovakia.