Draw
The group draw took place on 22 April 2007 in Wuhan after the completion of the qualifying rounds.
FIFA automatically seeded the host and defending champions, slotting China and Germany into Group D and Group A, respectively. The FIFA Women's World Ranking for March 2007 was used to determine the teams to occupy the other seeded positions, B1 and C1. United States were ranked first, Germany second and Norway third, so the United States and Norway were also seeded.
Also, no two teams from the same confederation could draw each other, except for those from UEFA, where a maximum of two teams from UEFA could be drawn into the same group. Group B quickly became dubbed the group of death since three of the top five teams in the world were drawn in this group — the USA (1st), Sweden (3rd) and Korea DPR (5th), according to the June 2007 FIFA Women's World Rankings, the last to be released before the tournament. The same four teams were drawn together in Group A in the 2003 FIFA Women's World Cup, on that occasion the USA and Sweden progressed to the knockout stages.
Read more about this topic: 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup
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