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Watch the European section of the World Cup draw

England will face Montenegro, Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, and San Marino in Group H when they bid to qualify for the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil.

Scotland and Wales were drawn together in Group A, and will play Croatia, Serbia, Belgium, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Northern Ireland are up against Portugal, Russia, Israel, Azerbaijan and Luxembourg in Group F.

Only group winners are guaranteed a place at the tournament.

With 13 places available in Brazil for European teams, the eight-best second-placed teams will play-off against each other to go through.

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It is not an easy draw. You have to be really, really focused and play every game like a final - but that will be another manager's job

England manager Fabio Capello

The Republic of Ireland were drawn against Germany, Sweden, Austria, Faroe Islands and Kazakhstan in Group C, while France and world champions Spain are in a five-team group - the only European group without six teams - along with Belarus, Georgia and Finland.

"Three years is a long time and 2014 isn't now," said France coach Laurent Blanc. "Spain are currently the best team there is but we don't know if that will be the case in two or three years' time.

"You have to go up against the best if you want to achieve something at a World Cup."

In the qualifying process for the 2014 World Cup, 203 teams will play an eventual 824 matches across the globe.

The draws for the Africa, Asia, Oceania and the North, Central America and Caribbean regions also took place in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, although no draw was made for South America as its nine teams qualify through a one-group championship.

The finals will take place between 12 June and 13 July, and a decision on whether to introduce goal-line technology will be taken at next March's meeting of the International FA Board, the game's lawmakers.

Continue reading the main story The total of 203 teams vying for one of 31 World Cup spots in Brazil surpasses the 200 who participated four years agoThe only associations not to have signed up to compete for 2014 qualification are Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Guam and MauritaniaFifa would not draw Azerbaijan and Armenia together, nor Russia and Georgia, because of political conflicts which they said could lead to fan violence during matchesGermany has been the most successful team in the last six World Cup qualifying campaigns, with only two losses in 74 matches

England manager Fabio Capello was present at the draw, although he is set to move on next summer after the conclusion of the European Championships.

Montenegro drew 0-0 with England at Wembley in October in their qualifier for Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine.

"It is not an easy draw," said Capello. "You have to be really, really focused and play every game like a final - but that will be another manager's job.

"We know Montenegro very well and we have to play against them again. Poland are improving and will be really focused and will be tough opponents. With Ukraine I remember the game we lost against them in the last match during the qualification for South Africa. Moldova are not so strong, and San Marino the same."

Wales manager Gary Speed said: "It's obviously a tough draw. It's a really tough group, but it could have been worse. There are no weak teams in the group. It's one of those groups where everyone can beat anyone."

Scotland boss Craig Levein admitted he had hoped to miss Speed's side in the draw, saying: "I would have rather avoided Wales because obviously it brings in that home international rivalry, which we probably could have done without.

"We have recent good experience of playing Wales, when we won against them over in Dublin recently, but also not so long ago we lost 3-0 to Wales, so it's a bit of a mixed bag."

Northern Ireland manager Nigel Worthington said of Group F: "It looks a reasonably tough group, but it could have been worse. There is a fair bit of travelling but you have to deal with that."

Find the 2014 World Cup preliminary draw in full here (external site).

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Adlington claims World 800m gold

Venue: Shanghai, ChinaDates: 16-31 JulyCoverage: Selected live coverage and daily highlights [of swimming phase] on BBC Two, Red Button, BBC Radio 5 live sports extra & online (UK only); reports on BBC Radio 5 live and website; watch again on iPlayer Superb Adlington wins gold

Rebecca Adlington produced a sprint finish to win the 800m freestyle at the World Championships in Shanghai.

The 22-year-old - who won silver in the 400m last week - was behind with 100m to go but overhauled Lotte Friis.

Adlington had never won a world title but held on to claim Britain's fourth medal of the meeting.

Earlier Michael Phelps won his 25th world title by winning the 100m butterfly in 50.71 seconds ahead of Konrad Czerniak and Tyler McGill.

Double Olympic champion Adlington and Friis were together from the start before the Danish swimmer made a break after 500m.

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That was one of the most exciting races I have ever seen and it is very unusual for an 800m race to finish so close. The girls will have been in agony so for Becky to find a sprint finish was amazing

Karen Pickering BBC Radio 5 Live commentator

World record holder Adlington was 0.65 seconds behind with two lengths remaining but managed to sprint clear to win in a time of eight minutes 17.51 seconds.

She told BBC Sport: "Lottie is always such a strong competitor that I knew it was going to be a battle.

"I'm so glad I've added to my collection. She is just an absolute competitor and always there battling.

"Next year it will be the two of us again but hopefully I'll have the crowd behind me.

"I don't think I can do the 200m in London as I don't have enough speed. I want to work on the 400 and 800m, they are the ones I prefer.

"But hopefully I will get a spot on the 4 x 200m relay team."

Phelps was only third at the halfway stage of his final but powered back down the second 50m to take his third gold of the week.

Defending champion Liam Tancock won his semi-final of the 50m backstroke in 24.62 seconds to qualify fastest for Sunday's final.

The Brit told BBC Sport: "I want to come here and race fast in every race and now I've got my spot in the final.

"It is a very tough field and medals could come from every lane but I am in there with a shot."

Adlington thanks supporters after gold win

Fran Halsall, who finished joint-fourth in the 100m, comfortably qualified for Sunday's 50m freestyle final after finishing second in her semi-final behind Herasimenia Ranomi Kromowidjojo.

Halsall was only able to resume training in March after undergoing ankle surgery last December.

Kate Haywood missed out on a place in the 50m breaststroke final by 0.02 seconds after finishing fifth in her semi-final, which was won by Russian Yuliya Efimova.

Lizzie Simmonds finished seventh in her 200m backstroke final which was won by 16-year-old American Melissa Franklin.

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Adlington will be under huge pressure in London as defending Olympic champion and now World Champion but she has shown that she can handle it.

Karen Pickering

Inge Dekker won the women's 50m butterfly in a time of 25.71 seconds while Brazilian Cesar Cielo Filho defended his 50m freestyle in 21.52 seconds.

Daniel Fogg could only manage the 14th fastest time in the 1500m freestyle heats, finishing in 15 minutes, 13.39 seconds. China's Sun Yang led the way in 14:48.13.

The women's 4x100m medley relay team, consisting of Haywood, Georgia Davies, Jemma Lowe and Amy Smith, finished sixth as winners the United States narrowly missed out on a world record.

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BBC vows to protect World Service

12 June 2011 Last updated at 09:18 GMT Lord Patten ruled out publishing individual stars' salaries Lord Patten has said his love of the BBC World Service made protecting it a "priority" - particularly the "core" Arabic, Somali and Hindi services.

The new BBC Trust chairman told the Sunday Telegraph he would fight for it as a 20% budget cut across the corporation takes effect this year.

The paper claimed he signalled in the interview that digital TV channels BBC3 or BBC4 may be axed to help secure it.

The BBC Trust denied this and said nothing had been decided.

The last Governor of Hong Kong told the paper: "If you want to know how good the BBC is, just spend time somewhere else.

'Goodwill'

"If you took anyone from any other country who comes here or listens to the World Service or looks at some of the BBC services, they think it's a fantastic organisation."

He said he planned to lobby Foreign Secretary William Hague over the government's funding of the World Service, which is due to end in 2014.

"I'm hoping that on Arabic services [we] will be able to protect that as something that is at the core of what the BBC is doing.

"I know what regard he [Hague] has for the World Service. I know he regards it as an important part of this country's soft power and I'm sure that with goodwill and without megaphones we'll be able to sort it out."

The BBC has to cut its spending by 20% - equivalent to 16% for the next five years in real terms - after last year's licence fee settlement.

While he admitted there would be tough choices ahead for the BBC, Lord Patten refused to talk about the merit of individual services.

"If I talk about individual services at this stage as not being a priority the assumption would be that that is a death sentence," he said.

But he said: "I think we're bound to face some tough decisions in the area of sport. It's extremely difficult for the BBC to bid for as many sports rights as it would like."

Lord Patten, a former Conservative Party chairman, confirmed he has asked for a longer term strategy for executive pay which, if existing targets are met, will have fallen by 25% by the end of this year.

He ruled out publishing individual stars' salaries, and said he would only reveal the number of employees in particular salary bands.

He also said that parents are best placed to enforce the 2100 watershed - pointing out that the dividing line should be easy to police but that it was up to parents to "get the balance right".

Newspaper reports have claimed that up to 1,500 jobs could be lost in BBC News alone.

But a BBC spokeswoman said: "We are not going to get drawn into a running commentary - no decisions have been taken and therefore these claims remain speculation.

"Any decisions coming out of the process would be subject to approval by the BBC Trust."

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The world behind your £3 cup of coffee

19 May 2011 Last updated at 10:30 GMT Most people don't give much thought to where the coffee process starts, but what is behind your ?3 cup of coffee, asks actress Hayley Atwell.

When I was 18, I worked in a coffee shop in central London. I would open the shop at 7am and serve coffee until four in the afternoon.

The boss taught me how to foam the milk so thick that the neck of the spoon rested on top, and took 30 seconds to sink into the coffee below. I still don't know if that's how a cappuccino should be made, but I thought it was pretty fancy at the time.

That experience paid for part of a RADA Shakespeare course - and a ticket to LA. This is the part coffee has played in my life. A decade later, I'm still hankering after a cup of the stuff most afternoons. It's about ?3 and it adds up.

Until last month, when I was invited to Nicaragua with Christian Aid, I hadn't really given that much thought to where the coffee process starts - where coffee is grown and produced, and who profits from that ?3.

The first thing that struck me about the country was how lush and green it was. How then, if it was abundant with natural resources like coffee and banana plants, was it the second poorest country in the western hemisphere after Haiti?

Struggling farmers

The conclusion I came to was this: disparity - the gap between the richness of its land and the material poverty of its people.

Hayley Atwell partly funded a drama course by working in a coffee shop

At the turn of the century, cheap imports drove down the world coffee market to nearly a third of its value. As a result, farmers were struggling to recoup their costs.

Soppexcca, a collective of 18 co-operatives founded 12 years ago to help coffee producers back on their feet, changed all that.

The way the co-operative works is simple: a small loan is given to a farmer who then buys land, seeds, fertiliser and employs labourers to work that land. The coffee they produce is processed further and sold by Soppexcca, mostly to overseas traders at a fair price.

We set off on a week-long journey through two communities. The first was La Paz del Tuma in the region of Jinotega. They have no running water, no toilets and no health centre. The children are schooled in an old room that once stored harmful chemicals.

Farmers have only been working as a co-operative for a short time and already a plot of land has been marked out for a new school the parents hope to build with the money they make through the scheme one day.

The second community, Los Alpes, has been working with Soppexcca for 12 years and the difference is astonishing. A leader, Gustavo Adolfo Talavera, took charge of his failing community by educating the children in his own back garden until the community had enough money and put in their labour to build a school, from the proceeds of their coffee.

Soppexcca also funds clubs such as "Coffee Kids" which teaches children agriculture and later offers them the chance to become expert coffee tasters and baristas.

I met a lot of local heroes on this trip, individuals who strive to move their communities forward so their children have a better quality of life.

It's extraordinary to meet Beatriz Alvarez, one of the very few women in Nicaragua brave enough to start her own coffee business, despite the lack of support and education usually offered to women. A petite and beautiful lady who had once lived in a shack of mud and plastic now has her own house and coffee plantation.

I'd love to say my taste buds also changed in that week. After a coffee-tasting lesson with one of the best baristas in the country, I was still none the wiser about whether one cup is a citrus-burst or an earthy oak. But I did know it was delicious and that I'll continue to drink coffee.

Now the next cup I drink will remind me how we are all in some way connected and responsible for the choices we make.

Before you know it, your daily choices in something as simple as a cup of coffee contribute to the well-being, or to the destruction of, coffee-producing communities around the world.

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The weird world of Fifa

1 June 2011 Last updated at 18:19 GMT Once Fifa was housed in a modest villa - today its base is a lavish HQ Fifa started out as a tiny voluntary organisation, and grew and grew into a global behemoth with more member nations than the UN. Here are six unusual facts about the secretive organisation that governs world football.

1. It is a registered charity. Fifa pays little tax in its home country of Switzerland. It also requires tax exemption in countries wishing to host a World Cup competition. "Any host country requires a comprehensive tax exemption to be given to Fifa and further parties involved in the hosting and staging of an event," a Fifa spokesman told the BBC last year. The 2010 tournament - the most expensive yet - cost South Africa 33bn rand (?3bn; $4.86bn). But a "tax-free bubble" was established around the event at Fifa's request, relieving Fifa, its subsidiaries, and foreign football associations of any obligation to pay income tax, customs duties or VAT.

2. This charitable status dates from its early days as a tiny voluntary organisation run on goodwill from a suburban villa in Zurich, says David Goldblatt, author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football.

Gaining advertising rights in Argentina - then a military dictatorship - required fancy footwork

3. Broadcast rights to the first televised World Cup - the 1954 tournament hosted by Switzerland and won by West Germany - were given away for nothing. With a global TV audience numbering many millions, Fifa realised this was a goldmine. By 1986, TV rights sold for 49m Swiss francs (?35m) - a fraction of the $2.4bn in broadcast earnings for the period of the last World Cup (see graphic below).

4. Fifa set the template for modern sports sponsorship after an awkward scramble to secure advertising rights for its new partner, Coca-Cola, at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. A military coup two years earlier threw up a dilemma for the organisers, says sports marketing expert Patrick Nally. With no control over the stadia, and no advertising agreements in place, how could Fifa ensure the soft drinks giant had a presence in such a strictly controlled country? It came down to money. Fifa asked Coca-Cola to advance it an extra 12m to 15m Swiss francs to buy these rights from Argentina, so it could then offer the company an exclusive relationship at its own event.

5. Globalisation of the game came under Joao Havelange, Fifa's seventh president and Sepp Blatter's predecessor. Spain expected to host 16 nations when it bid for the 1982 tournament; Fifa later told it this would be rounded up to 24, as Mr Havelange made good on his election promises to bolster training and opportunities for teams from Asia and Africa. To subsidise this, Fifa again went cap-in-hand to Coca-Cola for an extra $40m in sponsorship. The only way to make this worthwhile was to guarantee its sponsors wide-ranging benefits from exclusive signage, licensing and merchandising. "And with that, the package of exclusivity and global coverage that defines modern sports sponsorship was born," says Goldblatt, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 documentary Fifa: Football, Power and Politics.

6. Today Fifa has more member countries than the United Nations - 208 to the UN's 192. Only eight internationally recognised countries are not Fifa affiliates, including Vatican City, Kiribati and Monaco. It is a far cry from its beginnings in 1904, when the representatives of seven European football associations banded together with the aim of improving football's global reach.

Fifa: Football, Power and Politics was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 29 May - catch up on iPlayer.

Compiled by Megan Lane and John Walton

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