This still depends on rankings. What we've seen in this tournament (and many before it) is that rankings are a pretty poor estimate of actual performance -- or

This still depends on rankings. What we've seen in this tournament (and many before it) is that rankings are a pretty poor estimate of actual performance -- or at the very least, there are some outlier results which have perhaps gained notoriety due to their outlier nature. One problem I would suggest is that ranking are primarily derived from past performance. I'm not sure about the Elo ranking, but the official FIFA one is based on results from the last four years (eight years before 2006!) -- in highest-level football that is way too long. Perhaps another problem is that there are simply too few games in the tournament for this to work reliably. Given 50 games, a team's win-draw-lose count might be estimated pretty reliably, because a string of three bad games can be offset by a string of three above-expectations games. With only 3 games in the group round, funny things happen to probability. See: Paraguay with Elo ranking 22, Slovakia with Elo ranking 48, New Zealand with Elo ranking 60, Italy with Elo ranking 7, France with Elo ranking 12.