World Cup Preview

"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that."

~Bill Shankly

Seven days to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Now that all the squads have been set and the teams have begun arriving in South Africa, it's time for my pre-tournament preview and my (generally insane) predictions.

Overall, this has the makings of perhaps the most exciting World Cup in two decades. Of all the interesting aspects of the tournament, geography provides the most compelling storyline. A European team has never won a World Cup held outside Europe (the eight tournaments held outside Europe have been won by Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay). Add to that the aging, largely unimpressive nature of many of the European powerhouses (England is fielding the tournament's oldest team; France barely qualified; Italy seems lackluster; Germany is a shambles of injuries and managerial spats) and the fact that this is the first African tournament (an Asian team, South Korea, made the semi-finals in the first Asian tournament), the possibility for surprises seems high. I would be shocked to see a repeat of 2006 in Germany, with an all-European final four (Italy, France, Germany and Portugal).

It's hard for non-American's to understand, but this is also the first time I can remember that a major US media company (ESPN/ABC) is hyping the tournament like crazy and signing up to show all the matches in HD. They have even dumped the dubious announcing team of JP Dellacamera and John Harkes in favor of some Brits (and not just any Brits ... Martin Tyler, one of the best in the business). There's a lot of genuine excitement in the tournament, not just in a "team USA goes to the Olympics" kind of way. I think the fact that so many matches from the EPL, La Liga, Serie A, and the Bundesliga are shown on cable TV means that many more Americans actually know the top players who will take part from watching them with their clubs, which makes it more interesting and fun, and of broader appeal than simply the team USA matches.

Group Stage

Group A: This is one of my favorite groups, because all the teams are damaged goods and I can craft an argument for any two of the four teams making the elimination round. France has the pedigree (winner in '98, runner-up in '06), but their current form is poor and they have no clear leader. Mexico always rise to the occasion in the World Cup, but they have a relatively weak squad this time. Uruguay have tradition, but just squeaked past Costa Rica in the post-qualifying playoff to make the tournament. And South Africa are only here as hosts -- they would never have qualified otherwise. Mexico and France are likely to advance, but I think if the hosts can get three points from Uruguay, it might be Mexico and South Africa. Don't underestimate home turf advantage, particularly in far-away Africa.

Group B: While this is potentially a sneaky-hard group, Argentina are absolutely loaded with talent and my odds-on favorite to win the tournament. The big unknown is whether their coach, the volatile Diego Maradona, is a help or hinderance in their campaign. I think the first match -- the morning match on Saturday June 12 between Nigeria and Argentina -- will speak volumes about the Argentine character and potential in this tournament. Nigeria are arguably the best or second best African team in the tournament and I think they could make a run as far as the semi-finals. South Korea are quick, disciplined, physically fit and dangerous. Greece's defensive anti-football can cause problems, but they are light on talent and goal scoring threats I can't see them advancing. Argentina and Nigeria get out of the group.

Group C: The big question here is which USA team shows up. If it's the Confederations Cup runner-up, then I think they have a chance not only to advance from the group, but to win the group outright and potentially avoid a rematch of the 2002 quarter-finals with Germany. If it's the team that played the first half against Turkey, they won't make it out of the group. They are a difficult match-up for England in the opening round with their speed and goalkeeping. Donovan is peaking, Dempsey seems fully recovered from injury, and Bob Bradley made some clever choices bringing Findley, Buddle and Gomez rather than the usual re-treads (i.e., Ching). If Altidore's ankle sprain is really bad, I'd love to see Gomez up front. Unfortunately the USA are always inconsistent in group play, and their back four have been shockingly bad. Onyewu is struggling (he can't jump), while Specter and Bornstein looked terrible in the run-up friendlies. That said, England seemed very flat in their pre-tournament matches. They were totally unimpressive against lively sides from Mexico and Japan. They are over-reliant on Wayne Rooney to score goals. [UPDATE: ... and Rio Ferdinand, their captain and anchor of what has been a shaky central defense, injured his knee in training and is out of the competition]. There is no reason they shouldn't do well, but there's a nagging feeling of dread surrounding the team. Slovenia and Algeria are both good sides, but I don't see either challenging. USA and England advance.

Group D: I don't think Germany are all that good, and without the leadership of Ballack they could be in for some tough matches. Ghana, one of the best African sides, was dealt a tremendous blow with the injury to Michael Essien. Australia has some decent players (Schwartzer, Cahill). Serbia was great in qualifying, and can claim some of the old Yugoslav pedigree in World Cups. I think this is a bit like Group A in that you could make good arguments for a variety of outcomes given that there are no dominant teams. I like Germany to (barely) win the group, with Serbia taking the second place.

Group E: Holland are one of my favorite teams in the tournament, and along with Argentina one of my picks to go deep. I think they win all three matches in this group. The only interesting bit is who gets the second spot. I like Denmark, who had an under-rated romp through qualifying, besting Portugal and Sweden in a tough group. The crazy Samuel E'to controversies have added fuel to an already burning fire around Cameroon. And while Japan did ok against an out-of-sorts England, they have been in poor form for most of the last year or so. Holland & Denmark.

Group F: This is a gift of a group for Italy. New Zealand are woeful. Slovakia are ok, but have limited tournament experience (other than as a part of Czechoslovakia pre-breakup). Paraguay had a magical qualifying run during which they beat both Brazil and Argentina to finish one point out of first place in the South American qualifying table. In a more difficult group, Italy struggles, but here, it's Italy and Paraguay moving on.

Group G: Probably the worst possible draw for Brazil: a quality African side from Ivory Coast on near home turf (with Didier Drogba amongst the top strikers in the world right now, along with Kalou and the Toure brothers); '06 semi-finalist Portugal led by Christiano Ronaldo; and an unknown North Korean team. I would not be shocked if Brazil didn't make it out of this group. The Brazil-Portugal match on June 25 will be incredible. My head tells me Brazil and Portugal advance, but my heart tells me Brazil and Ivory Coast, the latter riding the African wave of goodwill to the elimination round. [UPDATE: Drogba broke his elbow in a friendly with Japan yesterday and is out of the World Cup. No way Ivory Coast beats Portugal without him. Goodbye heart, hello head.]

Group H: Spain have to be the favorite to win the cup after their Euro '08 win, their incredible unbeaten streak (ended by the USA in last summer's Confederations Cup), and their huge pool of talent at the peak of their careers. However, they don't seem to travel all that well. Chile are an unheralded but high-quality second place team in this group. Honduras is lucky to be here (thank you, Jonathan Bornstein, the USA defender, whose injury-time goal knocked out Costa Rica and allowed Honduras to qualify for their first World Cup in three decades). And Switzerland don't have the quality to compete here. Spain and Chile move on.

Elimination Round

Round of 16

Nigeria d. Mexico
USA d. Serbia
Holland d. Paraguay
Brazil d. Chile
Argentina d. France/South Africa
England d. Germany
Italy d. Denmark
Spain d. Portugal

Quarter-Finals

Nigeria d. USA
Holland d. Brazil
Argentina d. England
Spain d. Italy

Semi-Finals

Holland d. Nigeria
Argentina d. Spain

Final

Argentina d. Holland

10 Things We Learned About the US National Team in Holland

Ok, the Dutch are FIFA ranked third in the world behind Brazil and Spain. They are fantastic -- best Dutch side since their Total Football teams of the '70's. So even a listless Dutch performance is going to be a handful for the US national team. Still, we looked a mess out there and we learned some painful lessons:

1) We are really, really missing our injured stars. Dempsey's possession and ball control, Onyewu's physicality, Charlie Davis' pace -- they were all sorely absent in our performance against the Dutch. If a subset of those guys isn't back for June, we are in deep shit. I'm glad Bradley gave Findley a chance up front, because he was so awful that we know we can eliminate him from the squad for June.

2) Landon Donovan needs to be more consistently good. He was almost invisible against Holland. As he was against Sporting Lisbon and Tottenham for Everton last week. He needs to string three great performances together in South Africa if the US is going to have a chance.

3) Defending deep, ceding control of midfield, and hoping for a bit of luck with a long ball is not a winning strategy. I know Bob Bradley doesn't have a squad full of talent like the top European or South American sides. But man, is he that bad of a coach that he thinks he can play this way and be competitive against anyone other than Trinidad and Tobago? Come on.

4) Bornstein looked dangerously out of his depth. He conceded the penalty on an idiotic shirt-tug. He caused the deflection that produced Holland's second goal. He was abused on the left in the second half by the Dutch wingers, and literally fell on his ass while defending, almost allowing a third goal. He generally looked like a high school kid playing his first professional game. Shocking. I agreed with some of the commenters who said that he was Holland's Man of the Match.

5) Only slightly less worrisome is Specter on the right side of the defense. He looked ok the couple of times he came forward (he's good at early crosses), but he is very slow and not particularly imposing physically when defending deep. Elia toyed with him in the first half in the same way that Kaka did in the Confederations Cup. Against world class wingers like we'll see in South Africa, he could be badly exposed.

6) Our midfield passing was atrocious. The modern game is fast. One touch passing. Quick combinations. Movement off the ball. We did none of that, particularly in the first half. Terrible. We looked way out of our league.

7) Demarcus Beasley actually looked good. He came on in the 35th minute for the injured Holden and made some threatening runs at the defense, moved well up the wing, and even showed some grit against the very physical play of the Dutch. He's been so far off the radar screen that I kind of forgot he existed, but he certainly made a strong claim to a position in the starting 11. Much, much better than Donovan in the match against the Dutch.

8) Altidore looked like he's starting to come into his own. Often in past international football he seemed lost and frustrated. But he showed some real flair against Holland. A clever back heel / nutmeg on the touch line when trapped by two defenders, a couple of nice moves with back to goal, and that fantastic strike in injury time that almost produced the equalizer. His time at Hull has clearly helped him mature, and he's so athletic that when he starts playing with confidence, he could be scary.

9) We desperately need some good wing play. We have some of the best wingers we've ever had: Dempsey, Donovan, Beasley. Yet, until late in the second half you could have counted the number of attacks that came off wing play on one hand. Our central midfield was so poor in possession that the holding mids and defenders were just lobbing the ball over the top and hoping that Altidore or Findley could latch on to one.
I'd like to see Bradley try something like what we've seen at Fulham or Everton lately. Fulham play 4-4-2 but with Zamora almost a sole striker and Gera behind him. Everton play 4-5-1, with Saha in the Zamora role and Cahill as the attacking midfielder. We could play Dempsey (if healthy) and Beasley on the wings, Bradley and Feilheiber or Torres at midfield, and Donovan behind Altidore in the middle. Would give us a lot more attacking options than the lob-and-pray tactics we adopted against Holland.

10) If we play like we did against the Dutch, it will be three and out in South Africa. England will take us apart, and we'll likely draw (or lose) in our Slovenia and Algeria matches. It's hard to imagine that this was the same US team that beat Spain by two goals last summer (Spain's only loss in their last 24 competitive matches) and that went up 2-0 on Brazil, forcing the best team in the world to work for a late winner.

LD's Everton Adventure

Landon Donovan showed up at Everton FC in Liverpool the first week of January facing a veritable trial by fire. Everton, laid low for most of the fall with injuries and poor results, was embarking on a two month span during which the team would face fixtures with Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham (i.e., all 6 of the top 6 teams), as well as a tie with Sporting Lisbon in the Europa League and an FA Cup match. Donovan was about to be thrown into the deep end of the pool in the best league in Europe.

The incredibly crafty manager of Everton, David Moyes, inked a loan deal with the LA Galaxy and MLS to bring the USA international to the Toffees for 10 weeks prior to the start of the MLS season in March. The rationale was clear: Moyes needed a midfielder with Donovan's pace and goal-scoring potential to fill in for some injured stars, and Landon needed to keep himself match-fit and tested prior to the FIFA World Cup this summer.

It was a bit of a risky move for both player and manager. Donovan has been a star in the MLS and in international football, but a bit of a dud in Europe after two stints with big-name German clubs. Another bad experience in Europe would likely have tainted LD forever, and seriously hurt his confidence level going into the World Cup this summer. And a bad run of form from Everton in January and February could have sent the Toffees into a potential relegation battle at the end of the season.

Instead, Landon has been one of the great signings of the last transfer window. With Donovan starting (generally on the right wing), Everton drew Arsenal away, beat City, beat Sunderland, beat Wigan away, and lost a heart-breaking derby with Liverpool 1-0. Last week, the Toffees came from behind to beat league-leaders Chelsea 2-1 at Goodison Park, and this week thoroughly defeated last year's champion Manchester United 3-1. In between those league matches, they lost a close FA Cup game with surprising Birmingham, but beat Sporting Lisbon 2-1 in the first leg of their Europa league tie.

As of today, Everton are 8th in the table with their sights on a top-6 finish and potentially a spot in Europe. The Everton fans voted Donovan "Player of the Month" for January. The English press, never too keen on USA football imports, have been gushing praise and arguing for a long-term transfer.

Moyes has assembled a really talented squad of smart, skillful footballers at Everton: South African international Steven Piennar, Australian Tim Cahill, former Man. U. striker Louis Saha, wild-haired Belgian Marouani Fellaini, Phil Neville, and others. Donovan fits right in with that crowd, and his pace and cleverness have tormented some of the best defenders in the Premiership. While he hasn't scored a lot of goals (just one), he's forced defenders to deal with his threatening runs, and by doing so he has opened up the middle of the field for Saha, Cahill and Fellaini.

Everton played five midfielders against United and attacked throughout the match. Their overlapping runs, quick passing, and flowing football kept United on their heels for much of the match. There was a great sequence around the 35th minute when the Toffee midfielders passed, moved, changed positions, and made runs in a way that looked more like Spain than a middle-table English side. Everton's winner came off another flowing sequence. Piennar exchanged passes with Donovan down the left side, picked up the ball near the touch line and sent a sharp, low cross to a perfectly-positioned Dan Gosling at the far post, who tapped in for 2-1. To Moyes' credit, he had substituted Gosling for Bilyaletdinov (who scored the equalizer in the first half) just five minutes earlier, and his next sub, 18 year old Jack Roswell, scored Everton's third.

If you count the Europa and FA Cup matches as league matches, Everton have won 19 of a possible 27 points with Landon on the field, and 16 of 21 possible points in the league. I think the Everton faithful would have been expecting 7 or 8 points in those league matches. It has been a great run of form for a team that has been spotty all season. Whether they can do better than 7th or 8th in the table is more a matter of the teams above them, but another Europa League place next season is not out of reach.

What of Donovan's future? He's scheduled to return to LA Galaxy in mid-March for the start of the MLS season. During the balance of his loan, he'll see action against Tottenham, Hull and perhaps Birmingham in the Premiership, the second leg of the Europa League tie in Lisbon, and perhaps another juicy Europa League match in March (against either Athletico in Madrid or Galatasaray in Istanbul) if Everton get through to the round of 16. Given that he'll only be playing in MLS for less than 2 months before he breaks for the World Cup camp, I can't see why, short of an injury fear, he doesn't petition for extension of the loan at Everton.

An outright transfer is going to be dicey. The MLS, which owns his contract, is going to want more than the $10MM they got from Hull for Altidore considering that Donovan is their best marketing asset now that Beckham is semi-retired; and Everton has not generally been a big, splashy player in the transfer market. In addition, Everton are stacked at midfield, assuming everyone was healthy. Oh, and Landon is 28 years old, not a spring chicken by footballing standards.

I think it's more likely that after his great run in the Premiership, and assuming he has a good-to-very good World Cup, he gets interest from the likes of Manchester City, for whom a $15MM transfer would be peanuts, and who desperately need a clever wing player with pace like LD. That would be a shame. I think the combination of great club, great fans, and great manager at Everton would be ideal for him. But it just doesn't seem to be in the cards.

So, tune in this Sunday morning to the Fox Soccer Channel and watch Landon and the Toffees vs. Spurs. Should be a fantastic match. And, unfortunately, it might be one of your last chances to see Donovan in Everton blue.

Packaged Goods

I got a lot of feedback about my EA post. Since this blog is normally read by around 50 people, I welcome the new visitors. But because many people are here for the first time with no context, I think it's important that I try to distinguish the forest from the trees. My 50 regular readers know what I mean by "transition to digital" but a lot of the first-time readers don't.

EA has in the past three years invested in a bunch of interesting original IP and has vastly improved product quality. They have many compelling packaged goods games in the pipeline. From a consumer's perspective, there's a lot to be said for that, and many of the comments I have gotten have been centered around EA's turn-around from the hard core gamer's perspective. They have created a ton of goodwill with core gamers.

My point was not about whether Dead Space was a good game or not. It is. But it's largely irrelevant, a bit like winning a hand at a blackjack table in Vegas. The odds are stacked against you long-term. And this is my view of the packaged goods business. We can argue about how long it's going to take, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, the packaged goods games business is going the way of music CDs and books. You may still be buying games for $50 and downloading them (although I kind of doubt that will be the winning model). But one way or another, the games BUSINESS is going to transform into an e-commerce business.

This has many important implications. In an e-commerce world, the mechanics of distribution are completely different. It's about clicks, and visits, and trial (free-to-play) and conversions, and customer acquisition costs. This is a totally different way of thinking about distribution. The old packaged goods mentality of sell-in, inventory management, and crescendo marketing is totally useless in this new arena.

In addition, I think it's highly likely that we see a contemporaneous disruption created by the rise of games-as-a-service. World of Warcraft has shown that you can create an enormous business around a game that was released 5 years ago and then refreshed, updated, and run as a service in the interim. The amazing Zynga has shown the combined power of virtual goods in the games-as-service environment, and the benefit of a blue ocean distribution channel on Facebook.

The digital revolution has struck most media businesses as a form of what I would call "un-bundling." In the music business, this has taken the form of the rise of the internet-distributed MP3 song over the store-bought CD (originally, and mostly illegally on Napster, more recently and legitimately on iTunes). In TV, it was the DVR and cable channel expansion that killed the bundle known as network primetime.

There has been a lot of speculation about what form "un-bundling" will take in the games business. My own perspective is that the internet and digital distribution will create an un-bundling of time in the games business. Right now, the big publishers charge $60 for 40-80 hours of game play. I pay this price whether I play the game for an hour or whether I play it for hundreds of hours. I think that the rise of virtual goods and free-to-play models are leading indicators of this shift to un-bundle game time. So are the rise of casual, social and even mobile gaming. They are ways to capture gamer interest, and willingness to pay, in a manner other than the traditional $60 for 40 hours.

It is my opinion that media companies facing these sorts of market disruptions do better by embracing them early and taking their medicine, even if that means taking the axe to some of your existing businesses and processes. A great example of this is the Chinese game publisher Shanda, who recently changed their business model, took a year of pain and diminished stock price to get there, and then came back stronger than before. It takes a lot of courage to do this, because it's unpopular with your team, unpopular with your investors, and even, short-term, unpopular with your customers.

The US packaged goods companies have collected some important assets that position them on this road to the future. Blizzard, and Playfish, and Pogo, and JAMDAT are all examples. But in my opinion true leadership in the games business is going to mean betting the farm on these models and abandoning the CD-ROM as anything other than an alternative to downloading. Nobody had done that yet. Either it will happen, or a company like Zynga will leverage it's highly-advantaged distribution position into the core games market. The fanboys are going to recoil in horror from that statement, but it may be a lot easier for Zynga to buy up independent core games with e-commerce models (like Global Agenda, for example), than it will be for the major packaged goods publishers to switch to e-commerce models.

EA's Miss

After the bell today, EA announced a massive miss for their fiscal year, reducing revenue and earnings per share expectations. CFO Eric Brown also said in a conference call that they expect the packaged goods business to be flat to down for Fiscal 2011.

For anyone paying attention to the larger trends in the video game market, this could hardly have come as a surprise. A few days ago, Gamestop, a key packaged goods distributor for EA, announced a similar miss. While Activision was setting sales records with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, EA had no major hits -- although, in fairness the COD:MW2 revenue was probably just filling in a sinkhole at Activision created by a music game business that has fallen off a cliff. EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again.

John Riccitiello, the EA CEO, took over the reins of the company almost exactly 3 years ago. I was a senior executive at EA just prior to JR's return, and had a number of conversations with then-CEO Larry Probst about strategy at that time. As those who follow my blog know, I believed that the video game business had experienced a sea-change beginning in 2004, one that required immediate and decisive action.

My argument to Probst in February of 2007 was to reduce expenses immediately by a minimum of $200MM annually by reducing headcount and cutting back on ridiculous expenditures on risky titles (during my tenure, Spore and Godfather budgets had ballooned to ridiculous levels, and even spending on middle of the road products like The Simpsons and Superman had reached appalling heights). Meanwhile, I advocated hyper-aggressive R&D investment and acquisitions in a transition to digital distribution and games-as-service; combined with an approach to Wall Street that would position EA as a smaller but significantly more profitable company in the near term, with substantially improved long-term prospects when the digital future arrived.

This suggestion was derided by EA execs at the time -- they literally couldn't imagine going to Wall Street with a message of increased profitability rather than top-line revenue growth. They wanted to make the transition to digital while continuing to grow the packaged goods business. Ironically, they saw their looming innovator's dilemma as clearly as any company in the video game business back in 2006. They just weren't bold enough to act on that knowledge.

The old EA model was a basically a three-legged stool: 1) a profitable, recurring sports business (Madden, FIFA); 2) franchise games that produced big hits on a less frequent basis (The Sims, Need for Speed, Command & Conquer); and 3) a collection of digital assets (e.g.: Pogo & JAMDAT, and now Playfish) and distribution/partnership titles (e.g.: Rock Band & Left 4 Dead). Of those, the only stool leg left intact is the third one. Without the digital assets and the EA Distribution titles, they'd be in even more serious hot water.

EA's sports business has been hamstrung by vastly increased licensing costs (as I've discussed before) and failure to transition to a subscription/variable pricing model. This has substantially reduced the profitability of a business that EA used to rely on to fund other, riskier bets.

But by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to "grow their way through the transition" to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already "booked" (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy.

So now, a couple of months after the board granted JR another $7 million worth of restricted stock units in addition to 140,000 options and EA Games president Frank Gibeau another $2 million in RSU's, EA cuts financial estimates to the bone. And don't believe this is the end of the bleeding. This latest stock drop, if consistent with the after-hours trading, will wipe out virtually all of the gain from 2009. Unfortunately, the loss comes after one of my favorite EA execs, business warrior John Schappert, returned from Microsoft to take over as COO and started firing 15% of the workforce to reduce costs.

With EA's enterprise value down below $4 billion, it's remarkable that nobody has stepped in to put them out of their misery with an acquisition. Certainly, Disney has been looking at them since I was at the house of the mouse back in the early 90's. And there are Chinese companies, like TenCent, that could easily swallow EA whole.

It's equally amazing that the board continues to support the existing management team through this debacle. Since JR took over, the company has destroyed over $11 billion in market value. Certainly, some of that was the economy and the general erosion of value on NASDAQ, but Activision (the blue line below, vs. EA's red line) has experienced far milder effects from the recession:

It's remarkably hard to kill a company doing $4 billion in revenues. But with flat or down stock performance since Q3 2003, how long are the institutional investors going to continue to hope against hope for a turn-around?

The World Cup Draw

Well, if you read my last post and you followed the draw, you know that I think the USA got one the best possible draws -- as good as we could have reasonably expected. Overall, however, it was kind of a predictable draw, with few surprises and few really compelling story-lines in the group stage.

The USA's Group C is comprised of England, Algeria and Slovenia. England are a very strong side, but they have exploitable weaknesses at striker (other than Rooney, they are looking at the lumbering Heskey, the unpredictable Crouch or the untested Defoe) and certainly at goalkeeper (vis. "Calamity James"). And, England always struggle outside, well, England, but certainly outside Europe. They haven't made it past the World Cup quarter-finals in two decades.

Second and third match opponents Algeria and Slovenia are, at least by FIFA rankings, among the weaker teams in the tournament. Not that the US team couldn't blow it against either of them -- you'll hear a million times between now and June that there are no weak teams in the World Cup -- but believe me, Sunil Gulati and Bob Bradley were doing cartwheels in the aisles when they heard that we avoided both Ivory Coast/Ghana out of Africa, and France/Portugal out of Europe. And ESPN is going to market the fuck out of the England/USA opener, with Beckham and Donovan, the ghost of 1950, and the rise of the colonies to challenge the inventors of the beautiful game.

Mexico looked at first to have secured a dream draw in Group A against the pathetic hosts, South Africa. But Pot #3 produced the very good Uruguay, and Pot #4 cursed them with France. Heh. They still have a shot at advancing, but having to open against the hosts is never a great result. I think they could just squeak through, but I wouldn't be surprised if they finish last in the group.

Argentina, Holland, Italy and Spain received major gifts from the draw, particularly Italy. I'd be shocked if any of these four don't finish first in their respective groups. The English were feeling pretty good about their group, too, with only the game against the USA presenting a difficult match-up.

There isn't a clear Group of Death, but the best candidates are probably Group G with Brazil, Portugal, Ivory Coast and doormats North Korea; and Group D with Germany, Australia, Serbia and Ghana. You have to like Germany and Brazil to finish at least second in their respective group, but there could be some very big surprises. Mexico's Group A may not be Group of Death, but it's clearly a "Group of Grievous Injury."

World Cup Draw Preview

This Friday at 9:00am Pacific time, the iniquitous bureaucrats from FIFA, along with a handful of celebs and pols, will get together in Cape Town, South Africa for the once-every-four-years ritual known as the World Cup Draw.

This horrendously boring event, which can be cringe-inducing in its mock seriousness and cheese factor, involves grown men and women drawing 32 balls (representing the qualified teams) from 4 glass pots and placing them into eight groups. To punch it up, there are lots of speeches and terrible musical performances. Despite this, the draw, which is televised in 170 countries, is expected to be watched by almost 200 million human beings.

Why? Because the draw matters. Matters, at least, to the billion or so people who care about the sport of football and its ultimate tournament, the World Cup. The aspirations of teams and nations to footballing glory will hang, in some measure, on the result of the draw.

FIFA announced the seeding for the tournament today and produced a first surprise: they abandoned the tradition of seeding based on performance in the last two World Cups and went with FIFA rankings as of October 2009. On this basis, France were excluded from one of the top seedings (which prevent the best teams from eliminating each other in the first round); while Holland moved into France's spot.

The #1 seeds will be spread out across the 8 groups, and include hosts South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, England, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain. No arguments there. Excluding France was extremely fair, given their poor form of late (and the taint of their qualification over Ireland on Thierry Henry's handball). It was equally fair for them to elevate Holland, who have been on a tear and are FIFA ranked 3rd in the world.

The other major decision FIFA made was to put the North American teams in Pot #2 with the relatively weak Asia/Oceania teams, rather than with the unseeded but stronger South American or African teams, who went into Pot #3. This was clearly done to enhance the likelihood of African teams making the elimination rounds, but makes it much more difficult for the USA and Mexico, who would have had a high probability of drawing South Africa, the weakest seeded team by far, in the group stage.

From the USA perspective, the best case would be: 1. South Africa (or England, who always suck outside Europe); 3. Paraguay (or Algeria, if #1 is England); and 4. Slovakia or Slovenia. The worst case would be 1. Brazil or Spain; 3. Ivory Coast or Chile; and 4. France or Portugal.

And then there is the proverbial "Group of Death." Every World Cup has one, or at least a debate about which of the several tough groups truly constitutes this cup's Group of Death. The GoD refers to a group in which at least three strong teams are drawn together, meaning that one pre-tournament contender gets sent packing before the elimination round. There's a chance for a Brazil, Mexico, Ivory Coast, Portugal group, or a Spain, USA, Cameroon, France group.

When the dust settles, and we've endured Sepp Blatter, and Charlize Theron, and David Beckham, the freaking Soweto Gospel Choir, Johnny Clegg, et al., at least we'll have a tournament.