Choosing among outcomes, not methods

On Tuesday FIFA announced the eight teams, out of the 32 that have qualified for the World Cup finals next June, that will receive a top seed in one of the eight groups. After round-robin play within the groups, the top two teams from each group advance to a 16-team single-elimination bracket to determine the World Cup champion. Being seeded allows a team to avoid facing any of the other top seeds in the group stage of the competition, giving the team a more certain path to the second round.

The seeds are determined using a method that is dictated in general terms by FIFA guidelines. The specific implementation of those guidelines, though, is up to the Organizing Committee for each World Cup. The fine-tuning of these guidelines is announced at the same time as the seeds -- the Committee does not announce in advance the specific criteria it will use. This makes sense from the standpoint of event promotion, because the seeds would no longer be a mystery once the criteria were announced. Of potentially greater importance, it also allows the Committee to select a set of criteria that produces the most desirable set of seeded teams.

FIFA is running a business, so it would like to make decisions and take actions that produce the largest profits. Certain teams have larger fan bases with larger potential television revenues, so it would be beneficial to smooth their path to a longer stay in the tournament. And in the 1994 World Cup, two of Italy's first-round matches were played as relative home games, in Giants Stadium just outside of New York City, which boasts a huge Italian population. However, allowing economic and other off-field issues to override other measures of teams' relative quality on the field would make for very bad press. Given the choice, then, the Organizing Committee would prefer that the seeds turn out as desired by economic considerations alone, while using a method that utilizes only performance-based measures.

This wasn't as complex a problem as it may sound, at least this time around. Of the eight seeds, one is given to the host nation, in this case Germany. A second belonged to Brazil, unquestionably the strongest team in the world. There are another 10 teams that could reasonably have been seeded (Argentina, Czech Republic, England, France, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, United States), so there is a relatively limited set of potential outcomes.

[If you're thinking of a number, and it's 210, you're probably as big of a dork as I am.]

There is also a relatively limited set of methods, or selection and weightings of criteria, that are available for use in determining the seeds. Because the seeds will be definitively determined by the method chosen, the Committee knows the outcome that would result from each method. This means that the choice for any particular method is really a choice for its resulting outcome. The Committee is really choosing among outcomes, not methods.

Rather than comparing the possible methods to determine which is the fairest, the Committee can rank the derived outcomes in order of their projected economic value. Starting with the most favorable outcome, the Committee can proceed down the list until it finds one that is associated with a method that will withstand scrutiny.

This time around, if the Committee had decided to give slightly more weight to FIFA rankings, the United States would likely have displaced Italy as the 8th seed. However, if the Committee had incorporated the teams' performance at the last three World Cups (as the Committees for 1998 and 2002 did), instead of just the last two, Italy may have finished even further ahead of the United States (in 1994 Italy made the final, while the United States lost in the Round of 16). The Committee may have had a choice among several methods that all produced the same outcome -- the same set of seeded teams -- and settled on a method that caused the United States to finish a close 9th, rather than a distant 9th or 10th, with an additional selling point being that the method was only a slight tweak from that used at the previous two World Cups. [I'm probably understating the political desire to maintain consistency over time, as significant change is always subject to greater critique than maintenance of the status quo.]

When the outcome of a particular process is automatic, any choice involving modification of that process is effectively a choice among the potential outcomes. The seeding of teams at the World Cup finals is such a process, so an analysis of the choice of methods is not complete unless it considers the possible outcomes as well.