The U.S. men's team returns to the World Championship again after a one-tournament break after finishing third in the final round qualifiers.
So here at Onlyballs we decided why not dust off our crystal ball and make an extremely ambitious forecast for the 2022 World Championship.
Today marks a major turning point in the actual World Cup draw taking place in Qatar today.
How is the draw/world championship going (mostly)?
I'm sure I'll miss a lot of the nuances of how this works, but here's the basics:
All 32 qualified teams (or their respective playoff spots for games not yet played) will be selected from the four pots (listed above). These pots are allocated based on the FIFA rankings and will be used to form eight groups marked AH and each team will be assigned a group after being drawn from their pot and then assigned one of the positions 1-4 in each group.
Home team Qatar is guaranteed to be in Group A in first place as they play the first game of the tournament and then the round robin group stage starts from there. The rest of the group selection rules are quite simple. You cannot play against another team from your region, so the US will not play Mexico, Canada or Costa Rica in the group stage. The exception is Europe as UEFA selects 13 teams, so there will be 5 groups with two European teams. As the draw progresses, any conflict that arises, let's say Uruguay is eliminated from Pot 2 and placed in Group C, but Brazil is already in that group, Uruguay will advance to the next available group.
This makes sense in theory. Unless you are Champions League UEFA , which recently managed to ruin everything. The most difficult groups will be marked as "Group of Death", and there can be several of them in the tournament.
So what the TBM staff are going to do, and what we want you to do too, is post your own groups down in the comments. Want the US to beat Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal again on the world stage?
And given that the World Cup format is incredibly simple with how group winners and runners-up advance to the playoffs, we can start looking at each country's potential path to the final.
