World Cup Draw, National Football Team Placed in Group of Death

With the full list of teams participating in the South Africa World Cup confirmed, the draw ceremony for the tournament's 32 teams was held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre in South Africa on December 28.

Compared with the Ballon d'Or ceremony a few days earlier, this draw attracted even more outside attention.

More than 2,000 guests attended the draw, while over 1,700 media reporters came to cover it. More than 200 countries and regions around the world broadcast it live, with over 400 million people watching simultaneously. China alone accounted for nearly half of the viewers!

Although the organizers had arranged for famous singers to perform onstage, the vast numbers of Chinese football fans watching the broadcast paid no attention whatsoever to the singers.

Their minds had long since drifted elsewhere as they began putting their National Football Team fan specialty—calculations—to work, trying to figure out what kind of group would be most favorable for the National Football Team.

The South Africa World Cup pots were not determined entirely by strength and rankings. Aside from the first pot, all teams in the second pot came from Asia, Oceania, North America, and Central America.

The five African Teams and three South American teams went into the third pot, while the fourth-pot teams were all from Europe.

The result of this arrangement was that the second pot mattered little; the third and fourth pots were the real keys to determining whether a group would become a group of death.

As an Asian Team, the National Football Team was automatically placed in the second pot.

Before knowing their third- and fourth-pot opponents, being drawn into a group with a weaker first-pot team would obviously be highly beneficial to their chances of advancing.

[Other than host nation South Africa, every first-pot team