The 32 qualifiers are known for next year's World Cup finals in South Africa so attention will now turn to the draw.

The make-up of the eight groups will be decided by the draw which takes place on Friday December 4 in Cape Town (1700 GMT) - and of course you will be able to follow it live on this site.

However, before then there could well be more controversy.

The Republic of Ireland's exit this week has seen plenty more complaints made about the way FIFA decided to seed the European play-off draw at the last moment.

The world's governing body has yet to decide how the seedings or the draw 'pots' will be made up.

A look through the competition's regulations states only: "The FIFA Organising Committee forms groups for the final competition by seeding and drawing lots whilst taking sports and geographic factors into consideration, as far as possible.

"The decisions of the FIFA Organising Committee on the group formation and the duration of the final competition are final."

The committee is chaired by Issa Hayatou, of Cameroon, and also includes UEFA president Michel Platini and South Africa 2010 chief executive Danny Jordaan, among others. There is no English representative.

What is known is that the hosts will be seeded in position A1 in the draw, leaving space for seven other seeds. A decision on who those will be will not be made until the committee meets on December 2.

To determine the seeds for the 2006 draw, FIFA's committee looked at the finalists' performances in the previous two World Cups (on a ratio of 2:1) and the FIFA world rankings in 2006, 2005 and 2004 (each year given an equal weighting).

However, history suggests that the same system will not be used this time around as different systems were used in both 1998 and 2002.

This has ineviably led to complaints that the seeding system is designed to aid the so-called 'bigger' nations.

As for the draw itself, the teams are likely to be split into four pots with the seeds in pot A.

Last time there was also a pot made up entirely of European sides, plus two others containing teams from the rest of the world - hence's FIFA's talk of "geographic factors".

This means, for example, that two African sides cannot be drawn in the same group.

The finals themselves be held from June 11 to July 11 next year.

Full list of qualifiers:

Africa: Algeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, South Africa

South America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay

Asia: Australia, Japan, North Korea, South Korea

Europe: Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland

North America/Caribbean: Mexico, Honduras, United States

Oceania: New Zealand