FIFA’s favouritism backfires as France falter

By Amit Katwala, writing from London

In September 2009, FIFA decided that the play-offs between second placed teams in the European qualification groups would be seeded. This looks a fairly uncontroversial decision at face value, except when you note that the qualification process had begun a year before this, and FIFA were essentially changing the rules halfway through the competition. Although they had seeded the playoffs at this stage for the 2006 World Cup, they had made no indication that would be doing so in 2010, and it was suggested by some that those in charge had been waiting to see which teams would finish second before making a decision.

A cynical person would argue that when FIFA realised that Portugal and France were in danger of drawing each other in the play-off they made the decision to seed the draw, in hope of ensuring that more established, ‘better’ teams made it through to the World Cup Finals at the expense of the smaller nations. It could be argued that this would lead to a higher quality tournament overall. But are these teams really performing better than the countries that missed out would have done?