Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United States are the six seeded teams for the 2015 Women’s World Cup Draw. (Getty Images)
Hosts Canada are joined by Brazil, France, Germany, Japan and the United States as the six seeded team’s for Saturday’s 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup Draw. The five teams joining Canada are currently ranked in the top five in the world by FIFA, except for Brazil, which is ranked No. 6 in the world. Canada is ranked No. 8 but is automatically a seeded team as host.
Sweden is ranked No. 5 in the world but was not seeded due to geographical reasons which are factored.
The pots are as follows:
POT 1 — SEEDED TEAMS: Canada (host), Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, USA
POT 2 — CAF/CONCACAF/OCEANIA: Cameroon, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria
POT 3 — AFC/CONMEBOL: Australia, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Korea Republic, Thailand
POT 4 — UEFA: England, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland
As seeded teams, each of the six will be placed in different groups so that they can not play each other in the group phase of next year’s World Cup. Canada will be in Group A as hosts. The other five teams will be assigned groups at random during Saturday’s draw. They will be joined by one team from each of the other three pots of countries, with geographical restrictions preventing teams from being drawn into groups with another team from their confederation. However, there will be groups with two UEFA teams.
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Next year’s Women’s World Cup will be the first to feature 24 teams, expanding from the 16-team format used in 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011.
Saturday’s Women’s World Cup Draw will take place at noon ET and be aired live in the United States in English on Fox Sports 1 and in Spanish on Telemundo. The Telemundo broadcast will be livestreamed here.
