If you follow soccer at all you've likely heard the grousing about the 2014 World Cup draw, which has the US in the "group of death" with Germany, Portugal and Ghana and England in a very difficult group with Italy, Costa Rica and Uruguay, while host Brazil and (of course) France get what are considered to be fairly easy pathways to the round of 16.

All of which got me to thinking - is there a way to improve this? I think so, leading to...

MAKING IT BETTER: World Cup Draw Edition.

Here are my five suggestions for improving the tournament draw, leading off with one major change for the tournament itself.

1. Expand the field. I think the field should expand to 40 teams. That's still less than 20 percent of all FIFA members, and would allow for eight groups of five teams each (which I know presents various challenges, which I will presently ignore). I have no plan for how to expand beyond giving each confederation at least one more guaranteed spot (I'd limit UEFA and CONMEBOL to only one new slot each). But by expanding the field you'd create more cushion within groups. You'd likely still have a group of death somewhere, but not the sort of murderer's row we're getting in some of the groups for 2014.

2. Fix the FIFA rankings. The eight seeded teams for 2014 were determined by their FIFA ranking as of October 2013. The ranking is based on how a team has performed over four years, with results earning points, and with the final ranking based on some sort of averaging. Problem is that teams can game this system, as Switzerland did by not playing as many friendlies, and not against teams that are towards the bottom of the rankings. This article gives a good idea of how the ranking works and how teams can make it work in their favor.

I don't have a particularly good idea of what to use to replace it (Nate Silver's Soccer Power Index is an interesting example), but I don't think teams should be penalized for playing friendlies against lower ranked teams. If FIFA can give Qatar a World Cup based at least in part on growing the game in certain parts of the world, it can easily support that ideal by making games against teams from those areas not be an albatross around the higher-ranked team's neck.

3. Use the improved ranking to place teams in pots. As it stands now, there's one pot that includes the ranked teams and then the pots have some sort of geographic theme to them, so as to avoid any confederation from having more than one team in a group (or in the case of Europe, two teams). There's no seeding in those other pots, which is how you can get teams of similar ranking but different continents in the same group.

If you use rankings all the way through, you'd likely get groups that are more consistent with each other, and still use different pots to bring about geographical diversity (although using the SPI you could still wind up with a group having Germany, the US, and Portugal, as the US would the lowest seed in their pot and Portugal the highest in theirs).


4. Have someone outside of FIFA manage the draw. No one trusts FIFA. Even with a draw as apparently transparent as the recent one, you'll still get conspiracy theories based on FIFA's long history of corruption and cronyism. So just as the Oscar results are tabulated by an outside accounting firm, find someone else to run the draw. Not sure who exactly could do this that wouldn't have a vested interest in some team getting an easy group. Maybe some Canadians. They never make the World Cup.

5. Cut back on the pomp during the show. It's only an hour, but it's like some awful combination of the American Idol results show and the Eurovision song contest. If the lottery folks can draw six balls in under a minute for Mega Millions, we could wrap up the draw in ten minutes, easy. That'd give everyone an extra 50 minutes to complain about their team's group and devise conspiracy theories.

There you go, FIFA. Get crackin'.