Soccer World Cup Draw: Who Has the Hardest Group

Everyone has been talking about the new draw that has been released for the soccer world cup and who has the hardest group. Like every year, the Australians are complaining that we have the toughest group. Even the FIFA world cup website suggests that Germany and Brazil are in arguably the toughest two groups. Perhaps the other teams in those groups don’t have it tough for some reason.

But who has the toughest group? And who has the easiest run? Well we can roughly work that out once and for all. Using the World Football Elo Ratings, we can add up all the rankings for all the teams and determine which group will be the hardest.

Results are shown below:

Group A		Group B		Group C		Group D
South Africa	1508	Argentina	1876	England	1957	Germany	1933
Mexico	1875	Nigeria	1741	United States	1784	Australia	1773
Uruguay	1793	South Korea	1733	Algeria	1580	Serbia	1805
France	1863	Greece	1757	Slovenia	1641	Ghana	1683
	7039		7107		6962		7194
Group E		Group F		Group G		Group H
Netherlands	2002	Italy	1928	Brazil	2081	Spain	2067
Denmark	1774	Paraguay	1739	North Korea	1510	Switzerland	1764
Japan	1774	New Zealand	1538	Cote d’Ivoire	1763	Honduras	1729
Cameroon	1771	Slovakia	1636	Portugal	1843	Chile	1858
	7321		6841		7197		7418

Group H	7418
Group E	7321
Group G	7197
Group D	7194
Group B	7107
Group A	7039
Group C	6962
Group F	6841

So there we have it, according to the Elo ratings, Group H which consists of Spain, Switzerland, Honduras and Chile have the toughest group, whilst group F which consists of Italy, Paraguay, New Zealand and Slovakia have the easiest draw.

And Australia? Germany and Brazil? Group D and G are listed as third and fourth. A little tough, but nothing to write home about.

Check out all the free sportpunter soccer predictions here.