Group draw with unknown qualified teams: A lesson from the 2022 FIFA World Cup draw

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the 2022 FIFA World Cup draw process, revealing that the official seeding policy leads to unbalanced groups and proposing an improved method based on potential winners' rankings to enhance fairness.

Contribution

It introduces a new seeding strategy for tournaments with unknown qualifiers, demonstrating its effectiveness through simulations.

Findings

Official seeding policy results in unbalanced groups.

Proposed method improves group balance.

Simulations confirm the effectiveness of the new strategy.

Abstract

The draw for the 2022 FIFA World Cup has been organised before the identity of three winners of the play-offs is revealed. Seeding has been based on the FIFA World Ranking released on 31 March 2022 but these three teams have been drawn from the weakest Pot 4. We show that the official seeding policy does not balance the difficulty levels of the groups to the extent possible: a better alternative would have been to assign the placeholders according to the highest-ranked potential winner, similar to the rule used in the UEFA Champions League qualification. Our simulations reinforce that this is the best strategy in general to create balanced groups in the FIFA World Cup.