World Cup 2018 Draw: Live Updates and Analysis

The 2018 World Cup draw is taking place Friday at the Kremlin, which seems as good a place as any to unveil valuable information of massive global interest. Stay here for live updates and analysis from Moscow.

How to watch: The draw will be streamed at fifa.com/world cup at 10 a.m. Eastern. Television coverage in the United States will be on Fox Sports 1 in English and on Telemundo in Spanish. In the U.K., BBC2 will show the draw.

Here’s what to expect today.

■ The draw will take much longer than it needs to take. It always does. FIFA budgets about an hour for a mix of performances, speeches and, amid much social media grumbling, the draw itself.

■ The World Cup kicks off June 14, with Russia’s first game, in Moscow. It concludes there on July 15. Germany is the defending champion. No team has repeated as world champion since Brazil, in 1958 and 1962.

■ The 32 teams who qualified for the World Cup already have been seeded according to the FIFA rankings (cue more grumbling) and divided into four pots. The breakdowns:

Pot 1: Russia, Germany, Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, Belgium, Poland, France

Pot 2: Spain, Peru, Switzerland, England, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Croatia

Pot 3: Denmark, Iceland, Costa Rica, Sweden, Tunisia, Egypt, Senegal, Iran

Pot 4: Serbia, Nigeria, Australia, Japan, Morocco, Panama, South Korea and Saudi Arabia

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■ The teams will be drawn and placed into first-round groups one pot at a time: all the Pot 1 seeds first, then all the teams in Pot 2, and so on until the eight four-team groups are filled. It is a random draw, but there will be adjustments to keep regional rivals apart. Only Europe, which sends the most teams by far, can have two in the same group.

■ Don’t follow the World Cup unless the United States is playing? Well, have we got a surprise for you ...

■ Gary Lineker, the former England striker-turned-television pundit, will serve as the master of ceremonies alongside the Russian journalist Maria Komandnaya. Lineker played in two World Cups, winning the Golden Boot as the leading scorer in 1986 and helping England to the semifinals in 1990.

■ Wary of traveling within reach of investigators from the United States Department of Justice, the former FIFA president Sepp Blatter spends his days in his native Switzerland now. But he was invited to the World Cup draw by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and reportedly will attend.

■ Another rarity to watch for Friday: Pelé and Diego Maradona both will be at the draw, the former as a guest and the latter as one of the eight ball-drawing assistants. Rivals for the title of world’s greatest player, they have generally kept their distance over the years.

A news conference about the draw focused on Russian doping.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino held a pre-World Cup draw news conference Friday, but the topic of the draw barely came up. Instead, Infantino, appearing with Russia’s deputy prime minister, Vitaly Mutko, who leads the country’s World Cup organizing committee, spent more than an hour uncomfortably, and at times angrily, fending off questions about Russia’s doping scandal.

Infantino tried to distance FIFA, and the World Cup, from the accusations, which could see Russia banned from the Olympics next week — only months before the country hosts the World Cup. Mutko, formerly Russia’s sports minister and still the head of Russia’s soccer federation, was more combative.

Mutko has been implicated in what has been described by whistleblowers and investigators as a massive state-sponsored doping plan, but on Friday he angrily rebutted the accusations and vowed that Russia “will take a firm position and will defend its athletes until the bitter end.”

“There is no proof,” Mutko said at one point.

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