Ben Carter
speaker
694 appearances
29 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2013
last heard Aug 2018
Ben Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
On Friday 6th December, the eyes of billions of football fans around the world will be focused on one place, Costa de Soipe in Bahia, Brazil, where the World Cup draw will take place.
They've been seeded like this because of the world's highest-ranking teams.
And the longer you can avoid playing the best teams, the better chance you've got of progressing in the tournament.
You can understand why strong teams like Spain, Germany, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay are seeds.
They are very strong teams and always have been.
Between them, they've won 13 of the 19 World Cups that have taken place.
No, and countries who generally are considered to be up there, the Netherlands, Italy and even good old England, haven't been seeded.
So how have the sneaky Swiss been allowed to spoil it for the royalty of European football?
Well, the first thing to say is the Swiss are a good team who've had a very good year.
But to understand why the Netherlands and the Italians missed out, you need to understand the mysteries of the ranking system of FIFA, the International Football Association.
They have.
FIFA rankings are based on how a team has performed in the last four years, with most of the emphasis on the most recent year.
If a country wins or draws a game, it earns points towards its ranking.
Three points for a win, one point for a draw.
But different teams play different numbers of games, so the most important thing is it's all about your average.
You take the number of points a team has earned and then you divide it by the number of games that they've played.
It's absolutely key.
So it does get quite confusing.
But let's look at an example.
The Dutch victory over the world number one's Brazil in the quarterfinals of the last World Cup earned them the maximum number of points possible, a total of 2,400 points.
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