World football governing body FIFA have
revealed how the Super Eagles and 31 other
qualified teams will be drawn for next year’s
World Cup in Russia on Friday evening.
The draw ceremony at the Kremlin Palace in
Moscow will start 3.30pm Nigerian time and
will be broadcast live by SuperSport TV.
The October 2017 edition of the FIFA/Coca-
Cola World Ranking was used to allocate all
qualified teams to the four pots in descending
order, with the best seven teams along with
hosts Russia in pot 1.
The draw sequence will start with pot 1 and
end with pot 4.
Each pot will be completely emptied before
moving on to the next.
As per the standard procedure, a ball from a
team pot will be drawn, followed by a ball from
one of the group pots, thus determining the
position in which the respective team will play.
It should also be noted that in pot 1, Russia
will have a red ball and will be pre-assigned
the position of A1 as host.
The remaining seven teams in pot 1 will
automatically be drawn into position 1 of each
group (B to H), whereas teams in pots 2, 3 and
4 will be drawn into positions randomly in their
groups.
FIFA’s general principle is to ensure that no
group has more than one team from the same
qualification zone drawn into it.
This is applicable to all zones except Europe,
which is represented by 14 teams.
Each group must have at least one but no
more than two European teams drawn into it.
As such, six out of the eight groups will
feature two European teams.
The distribution of the teams into the groups
according to the geographic separation
principle will be monitored by a system
designed to take all parameters into account,
which means that groups may be skipped. For
example, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay, which
are in pot 2, will not be drawn into the same
group with Brazil or Argentina, which are in
pot one.
The same principle will apply to the teams
from the other confederations with the
exception of UEFA.
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