Seedings
Tournaments are often seeded to provide an even distribution of strong and weak competitors across all preliminary groups. However, in association football, the ranking methods used for seeding may be crude. In the World Cup, the usual strategy is for each group to contain one seeded team and three unseeded teams, the unseeded teams picked from separate regional confederations. Some CONCACAF, African and Asian teams are significantly stronger than others. The net result is that some groups may have stronger teams than others.
The reigning champion and the host nation or nations are traditionally among the seeds. In the case of Euro 2008, this meant three of the four seeds were among the weakest teams in the tournament: hosts Austria and Switzerland, and surprise 2004 champions Greece. 2006 World Cup finalists France and Italy were unseeded and ended up in Group C with Netherlands and Romania. This was considered a "group of death" with Romania as underdogs against three of Europe's top sides.
Read more about this topic: Group Of Death