The US has qualified for the World Cup

Well, everyone else did! The estimates I read (no cites, sorry) ranged from 60-75% Honduras support. Not that I think that’s a good excuse for losing, mind.

BTW, ElvisL1ves, the difference between Celtic and Rangers is that one club is sitting at the top of their group (above Juventus and Porto) in the Champions League while the other one barely scraped a win against some team from Dagestan (yes Dagestan) in the UEFA Cup. Simple eh? :wink:

Pardon the minor hijak, but perhaps one of you soccer—er, football-lovin’ folks could answer a question (if it’s too off-topic, say so and I’ll hitch a ride to GQ).

Browsing the BBC’s very nice World Cup site it’s easy to see that each region has its own “system” for determining which teams go to the finals. What I wonder is: who or what determines the actual number of teams from each region?

I mean why does Africa get 5, Europe 13 or14, North America 3, and Oceania 1 or 0? Clearly there’s an issue of quality—football teams from, say, Asia are not on par with European teams, and so allowing 13 instead of 5 teams from Asia would be inappropriate. And obviously FIFA gets to make these determinations.

But is there a true, math-based system at work here, or is it up to the caprices of the FIFA dudes? Do they say, “Well, according to our new FIFA rankings, Asia teams now have a cumulative ranking of 37547.0083 and thus the Asians will get 5 teams next World Cup” or is it more like “Ya know, those Asians sure are spending a lot of money buying our World Cup T-shirts. Let’s let ‘em have 5 World Cup teams next time.”

Or something in between? I’va asked my fellow football fanatics and they don’t know. Anyone?

To answer the above; there are various reasons to do with quality, perceived quality and history.

In Europe we have the advantage that we came first, indeed the UK could potentially have 4 separate teams in the finals (this has only happened once), whereas the whole of Oceania only gets a play off spot against the Runners up of South America (this year most likely Brazil!) and usually Israel.

In recent years Europe has lost two places to Africa, and the tournament has been expanded from 16 to 32.