No Offense, FIFA, but You're a Total Joke

Imagine this scenario:

In every season since the NFL went to 6 playoff spots per conference, the playoff spots have been taken by division winners first, and then the remaining slots have been filled with the teams with the top records in each conference, so that each conference starts the playoffs with 6 teams.

Now let's flashback to 2008. The season is over, everyone has played their 16 games. The standings are as you see here. At the end of the season, Roger Goodell meets with a group of senior NFL personnel. They make the following 2 decisions:

1) San Diego does not deserve a playoff spot. They're 8-8, for pete's sake. They were 4-8, they basically had to go to a pre-playoff for the last 4 games, just to squeak in by the skin of their teeth. Meanwhile, you have the Baltimore Ravens, who breezed through the AFC with an 11-5 record, despite starting a rookie quarterback all season long. Plus there are the Colts, they put up 12 wins, and Peyton Manning is a top player. Is that really what we want? To give San Diego a seeded spot and make Baltimore and Indy go on the road?

2) Arizona made the playoffs. After that 49-7 loss at Gilette. The Patriots didn't even make the playoffs! Do we really want to reward these clowns a home game, simply because their division couldn't beat a team of the Octomom and her kids? Look at Atlanta, another rookie quarterback, another 11 win season. We should reward the Falcons with a home game, to give Arizona one just doesn't feel right.

Okay, now that they've decided how they feel the seedings should be, now all that's left is determining how to get the seeds to work out that way. An easy way to punish the teams that struggled to get in is to make the playoff seedings based solely on records and remove division titles from the seeding equation. That would cause the seedings to look like this:
AFC: 1) Titans 2) Steelers 3) Colts 4) Dolphins 5) Ravens 6) Chargers
NFC: 1) Giants 2) Panthers 3) Falcons 4) Vikings 5) Eagles 6) Cardinals

Imagine the uproar when the NFL announced, "These are the seedings, as we changed the seeding criteria from what we used last year to just look at records this year." Chargers and Cardinals fans would be furious. The established guidelines stated that winning the division guaranteed a home playoff game, but the NFL decided they didn't like the results of those criteria, so they changed the criteria after all of the games had been played so they'd know exactly what the outcome of their chosen criteria would be.

It would be like handing over the management of their league to 6 year olds. When a 6 year old plays a game, s/he'll play by the rules as long as s/he keeps winning. Oh come on, I'm not the only one that did this at that age, stop shaking your head. As soon as the tide turns, new rules start popping up. "Oh, you rolled a 12? You have to go back to the start." Or, something like, "I win with an all evens straight." When a 6 year old does this, it's cute (see here. When a bunch of old men do this, is it really cute anymore?

Well, this is exactly what FIFA did, and it's what they do every 4 years. Every 4 years, they rank the World Cup teams 1-32. The host country and the top 7 other countries in the rankings are each placed into a unique group of 4, so there is a real advantage to being seeded. It means you won't have to face a Brazil, or a Spain, or an England before you make the round of 16 at the earliest.

For the 2002 World Cup, the seedings were based on the team's performance in the prior 3 world cups (1990, 1994, 1998), and the FIFA World Rankings of 1999, 2000, and 2001.

For the 2006 World Cup, the seedings were based on the team's performance in the prior 2 world cups (1998, 2002), and the FIFA World Rankings of 2003, 2004, and 2005.

For next year's World Cup, the seedings were based on the October, 2009 FIFA World Rankings. That's it. For reference, if FIFA had used this exact criteria back in 2006, the United States would have been seeded, along with the Czech Republic, and Italy would not have been.

Why was it done this way? Well, no one from FIFA will say it, but it was done to punish France. The only change in seeding between last time's criteria and this set is France loses its seed to the Netherlands. I don't know if it was because the Thierry Henry handball was an embarassment (I highly doubt it), or whether it was because France had to win a playoff against Ireland just to get into the World Cup by the skin of their teeth (I'd put money on this). Had France won their qualifying group instead of needing to go to a playoff, this change would not have been made.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm against the idea of keeping a team that had to win a home-and-home series to qualify because they couldn't do it by winning their qualifying group from a seeded slot in the World Cup. However, I am strongly against running the World Cup like a bunch of 6 year olds. Pick a set of criteria at the beginning of qualification, not at the end. If you feel that a team in France's (or Portugal's) shoes doesn't deserve a seed, fix the criteria for the next World Cup. Don't just go changing it willy nilly so you can get the result that you want.

The unspoken message here (for a US Soccer fan) is don't ever get your hopes up for a World Cup seed. You can do everything right, but if we (FIFA) don't think you deserve a seed, we'll just change the criteria to knock you down and out of the running. Since US Soccer gets no respect on the world stage, barring a 10 year run where the US wins 2 World Cups and is ranked #1 in 98% of the monthly rankings, the US is not getting a seed. And, to be frank, even that may not be enough.