World Cup draws and probabilities
How do constraints affect the chance teams will face each other?
3 min readApr 5, 2022
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The televised World Cup draw selected groups for the men’s football competition. There are three good properties for a drawing system to have:
- Fairness: no team should have greater chances than others of a ‘tough’ group.
- Balance: the groups should be at a similar competitive level.
- Uniformity: the probability of each valid outcome should be the same.