The draw for the 2010 World Cup takes place on Friday this week and when it is over, every football fan following the event will know who their country have. Basically, the World Cup starts on Friday as we'll be able to create little league tables, even if they are all going to be on zero points for a few months.

But how is it all going to work? Well, that is the point of this post. We are going to explain it to you as best we can. We say as best we can, because we will not know until tomorrow who the seeded countries are, but we are going to take a guess and yes, for the purposes of this post, England are seeded.

But, before we get to what teams we think are seeded and the pots where all the teams, you need to know a little more. The 32 teams will be drawn into eight groups of four and the top two in each group will make it to the knockout stages, beginning with a round of 16.

Now, like we've said, we don't know for sure what the groups are going to be, but we can take a guess. So we are.

Henry Winter, Telegraph Football Correspondent, explains: "A combination of precedent and grapevine chatter suggests FIFA will form four pots of eight nations based around confederations, performances at the last two World Cups (with 2006 finishes worth double 2002 results) and the world rankings of Dec 2007, Dec 2008 and Nov 2009."

So, if we assume that is going to happen and that no more than two European nations can be drawn together in the group stages, we can list the following for as the expected World Cup seedings and remaining pots.

Pot One (seeds)

Argentina, Brazil, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, hosts South Africa and France.

Pot Two (rest of UEFA)

Denmark, Greece, Holland, Portugal, Slovenia, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland.

Pot Three (AFC + CONCACAF)

Australia, New Zealand, Honduras, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Mexico, United States.

Pot Four (CAF + rest of CONMEBOL)

Algeria, Cameroon, Chile, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Paraguay, Nigeria, Uruguay.

The draw takes place at 6pm local time and should last approximately 90 minutes. President Jacob Zuma and FIFA top cat Sepp Blatter will welcome the audience and Charlize Theron and David Beckham are both expected to take part.

We will be updating the site with groups as they get drawn out.