The draw for the 2015 World Cup will be on TV, but which teams will be seeded remains unclear. (Photo: Canada Soccer)
The 2015 Women’s World Cup draw on Dec. 6 will be televised in the United States on Fox Sports 1 at noon ET. Fox Sports says it is the first time since the 1999 World Cup draw that the event is being shown in English in the United States.
Which six teams will be seeded, however, remain mysteries.
The 24 World Cup teams will learn their fates at the draw but it is unclear still how the teams will be separated. There will be six groups of four teams each, and seeding for World Cups in the past have used the FIFA world rankings to determine seeds.
Ensuring a position as one of the seeded teams can be critical to obtaining a more favorable path to the World Cup title, since all six will be in separate groups.
Asked by The Equalizer to clarify the process, a FIFA spokesperson said Tuesday the the draw procedure and seeded teams will be revealed during the press conference the day prior to the draw. By contrast, the draw for the 2014 men’s World Cup saw the seeded teams announced almost two months prior.
Geographic considerations are always in play for seeded teams. Canada will be one of the seeded teams as hosts, leaving the top five as the presumed next five seeded teams. But three of the top five teams in the world — Germany, France and Sweden — hail from Europe, something that could cause FIFA to skip over No. 5 Sweden and give No. 6 Brazil a spot as a seeded team. So the seeded teams could potentially be Canada, U.S.A., Germany, Japan, France and Brazil, but that won’t be fully known until Dec. 5.
Fox’s hour-long studio show will be hosted by Rob Stone and it will feature reports from on-site in Ottawa from Heather Mitts, Ariane Hingst and England’s Kelly Smith. Awful Announcing reports that Tony DiCicco and Grant Wahl will also join the show.
