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The World Cup in Brazil is only a month away, so now's about the time to start making picks and projections.

I devised a rough system of categorization that sorts the qualified teams into four tiers descending from most likely to least likely to win or compete in the final match.

The first tier is the "frontrunner" tier, followed by the second tier (contenders; teams that have a good chance of pulling upsets), then the third tier (longshots; teams that are not likely to go past the round of 16 but have the capacity to pull upsets), and finally he fourth tier (ultra-longshots; teams that stand almost no chance of doing anything significant in the World Cup).

Here's the list of qualified teams:



AFC (4)

Australia
Iran
Japan
South Korea

CAF (5)

Algeria
Cameroon
Ghana
Ivory Coast
Nigeria

OFC (0)

None qualified



CONCACAF (4)

Costa Rica
Honduras
Mexico
United States

CONMEBOL (6)

Argentina
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
Ecuador
Uruguay



UEFA (13)

Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Croatia
England
France
Germany
Greece
Italy
Netherlands
Portugal
Russia
Spain
Switzerland



Here's my list (I also put the teams in descending order within their tiers)

Front-Runner (First) Tier
Germany
Brazil
Spain
Italy

Contender (Second) Tier
Argentina
Colombia
Belgium
France
Uruguay
Netherlands
Portugal
England

Longshot (Third) Tier
United States
Chile
Russia
Croatia
Japan
Greece
Switzerland
Bosnia
Mexico
Ivory Coast
South Korea

Ultra-Longshot (Fourth) Tier
Ghana
Mexico
Costa Rica
Algeria
Nigeria
Australia
Honduras
Iran
Cameroon

Oh, Mexico is supposed to be in the longshot tier, ignore the second one.

Looks solid to me, though I'll give it a better read.

Who would you put money on if you were going to?

The answer is always Germany for me.

I would change Italy with Argentina.

I guess my changes now would be to move down Uruguay to the bottom of the contender tier, move Costa Rica up to middle-low longshot from ultra-longshot, and move Netherlands to frontrunner. Spain is still a frontrunner, but it's at the bottom now. Also swap Ivory Coast and Japan's positions.

If you keep updating it til after the last game you'll be super correct!

I love arbitrary lists for sports, I do a lot of it myself. But for something like this, I'm wondering why you didn't just use betting odds. They're not perfect, granted, but they do accurately place the general sentiment on teams.

If you dislike betting odds, Nate Silver's website FiveThirtyEight has some great statistical analysis, and it's continually updated to reflect match results:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/world-cup/

So for example, the US had the smallest chance to escape their group at the beginning (though Ghana was close), but now they have a 68.5% chance of making it to the knockout stage.

By their calculations (they detail their methodology in the link if you're interested), Brazil is a ridiculous favorite, even more so than the betting odds would suggest.

Lol, Spain to longshot.

Brazil seems overrated. Both games were pretty poor showings.