France the Looming Threat as England and Others Await World Cup Qualifying Draw

The draws for the qualifying stages of the 2018 World Cup take place on Saturday afternoon in St Petersburg, with 141 countries set to discover the exact nature of their route to the tournament in Russia.

The draws for Europe, Africa, Oceania, South America and CONCACAF will all be held (Asia’s qualification process is already underway), albeit with different regulations and structures to all of them. Some draws are more complicated than others: With all 10 South American teams in one group, all they have to decide at the luxurious Konstantin Palace is the fixture list, but for others, Europe among them, there is a bit more to be finalised.

The European system will see the 52 teams (Russia have qualified as hosts) drawn into nine groups: seven groups of six teams and two groups of five. Due to television broadcasting deals, the bigger nations (England, Germany, Spain etc.) are guaranteed to be in a group of six.

That is the basic logistics of it all, but for the major European nations, the big question essentially boils down to this: Where will France be drawn? As the biggest name outside of the top seeds, they are the team that will define how other nations evaluate their eventual group-stage draw.

Placed in pot two, Les Bleus could well enter the World Cup process as recently-crowned European champions and, even if they don’t, seem sure to return to the qualifying scene with a prodigiously powerful squad and some world-class players (presumably) entering their prime—Paul Pogba, Raphael Varane, Kurt Zouma, Antoine Griezmann.

Yet the draw is now, when their potential is perhaps not reflected in their current world ranking, and consequently France could completely erase the value of being top seed for whichever side they end up being grouped with (Italy are in the same situation but, as of right now, perhaps do not hold quite the same potential fear).

With only one team from each group guaranteed to go through to the World Cup (a play-off between the eight best runners-up will decide four other spots), the eventual placing of other teams lurking lower down the seedings than their quality might suggest (Denmark, Sweden, Turkey) will also be keenly watched.

For the likes of Germany, England and Spain, the difference between a "good" draw and a "bad" one could be the difference between facing France, Sweden and Turkey or Iceland, Albania and the Faroe Islands. In other words, pretty significant.

---

European seedings

Pot One: Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, England, Wales, Spain, Croatia.

Pot Two: Slovakia, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, France, Iceland, Denmark, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Pot Three: Poland, Ukraine, Scotland, Hungary, Sweden, Albania, Northern Ireland, Serbia, Greece.

Pot Four: Turkey, Slovenia, Republic of Ireland, Norway, Bulgaria, Faroe Islands, Montenegro, Estonia, Israel.

Pot Five: Cyprus, Latvia, Armenia, Finland, Belarus, Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Moldova.

Pot Six: Luxembourg, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein, Georgia, Malta, San Marino, Andorra.

---

For Wales, a surprising top seed, they will be particularly hopeful lightning does not strike twice, after their rugby team was drawn in the same group as heavyweights England and Australia for the forthcoming Rugby World Cup.

They may or may not arrive for World Cup qualifying having just participated in their first major international tournament since 1954 (at the time or writing their Euro prospects look promising), but their chances of reaching another will be greatly improved if they can avoid France and Italy when Saturday's draw is made.

England, in contrast, might benefit from a little extra competition after a European Championship qualifying process that has hardly offered much of a test. It is hard to make any reliable assessments with over a year until World Cup qualification starts and a whole other tournament to take place in between, but Roy Hodgson’s side could very much do with some testing competitive fixtures to battle-harden them and accelerate their development.

Hodgson will undoubtedly want to avoid France and Italy, but in a perverse way, he will probably be similarly eager to avoid the cakewalk currently being experienced on the road to the Euros. He will want some semblance of a test, just one that his squad will be confident of overcoming.

LEON NEAL/Getty Images

Of course, there is no guarantee that Hodgson will be in charge come the start of actual qualification games—considering that his current contract with the Football Association expires next summer.

Hodgson is expected to be part of the English delegation in St Petersburg, perhaps an indication that he is likely to continue in the role and see the challenge through. That is certainly what he intimated in his last public comments on the matter.

“At the moment I feel good and I don’t feel anything like my age,” Hodgson, 67, said recently, per the Daily Mail. “I hope that will continue for a few more years.

“I am confident that I will know what the right time is. But I have an important job to do which I really enjoy, so as for 2018 and 2020 we will see.”

A cautious man by nature (and one who often seems surprisingly sensitive to his public perception), it is interesting to wonder whether the draw itself might finalise Hodgson’s decision either way. Get paired with France, for example, and perhaps the fear of failing to qualify for the final tournament (and the ridicule that would come with that) may outweigh the desire he has to make amends for the failure of 2014.

Of course, even that will depend on how England do at next summer’s Euros and whether Hodgson is even given the opportunity to decide his own future. That is far from a given.

Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

While the draw only briefly turns attention toward a tournament that is still three years away (once it is completed, presumably most nations will return their focus to short-term goals), it will also be a rare moment where the competition is not in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Having been shrouded in controversy almost from the moment Russia was awarded the World Cup, it will make a change to be discussing the tournament for footballing reasons rather than socio-political ones.

Even so, there has already been some negative attention this week, after Zenit St Petersburg forward Hulk, who was due to conduct part of the draw on Saturday, withdrew from the occasion.

A few days earlier, the Brazil international had created headlines when discussing racism in Russia, saying, via the Guardian: “It happens at almost every match in Russia but the world does not hear about it because they try to keep it quiet." A few days later, FIFA was explaining that “club commitments” would now keep him out of the draw, something that understandably raised eyebrows among observers.

It is tempting to suggest that the initial decision to choose Hulk for the draw was precisely to pre-empt any criticisms of racism in Russian football, a move that perhaps now looks somewhat calculated considering he has suddenly been dropped from the occasion.

Former Russia international Alexey Smertin will now replace Hulk for the draw and will serve alongside the likes of Ronaldo, Diego Forlan, Fabio Cannavaro, Samuel Eto’o and Oliver Bierhoff. But the incident, along with the shameful recent treatment of allegations of racial abuse in a Russian Premier League game made by ex-Arsenal midfielder Emmanuel Frimpong, suggests this is going to be a growing issue as we get closer to the tournament.

"It is a behavioural problem. It is a societal problem. In Russia, indeed we have also noticed there is no understanding of what racism means," United Nations anti-discrimination chief Yuri Boychenko told reporters last week, per CNN.

"The authorities here should recognise there is a problem, and I believe the recognition is coming."

If that is true, then it cannot come soon enough, and you sense that until it does, this is a controversy that Russia will keep being asked to confront the closer the tournament gets.

On Saturday, however, the teams involved will simply be focused on discovering who they will have to beat to get to that stage—with European ones hoping, above all, that they avoid the French.