SOCCER: Ireland's status as fourth seeds for the Euro 2008 campaign was sealed on Wednesday night with the team's failure to beat Switzerland leaving them in 24th place of the 50 countries that will enter the hat in Montreux, Switzerland, on January 27th.

With several results in other groups actually going the way of the Irish a win would have salvaged a place in the third tier of nations for the Republic but the team will now have to battle its way through from a decidedly weak position if qualification for the 2008 finals is to be achieved.

Holland tops the seeding list after an impressive campaign while England, Portugal and Group Four winners France are also amongst the top ranked sides. The Czech Republic retains its place amongst the elite despite failing to qualify automatically on this occasion. The Greeks are automatically included in the top seven as holders, meanwhile, something that means Germany are relegated to second seeds.

The list is compiled by simply adding all of the points amassed by each team during the group games of the previous two campaigns and then dividing the total by the number of matches played. Ireland's total is 1.56 points while the Dutch managed an average of 2.55 points per game.

The two additional points that a win over the Swiss would have yielded would just have been enough to put the Irish fractionally ahead of Slovkia who stand on 1.65 points. Other countries now rated ahead of the Irish in Europe include Bosnia Herzogovina and Bulgaria while Latvia, Israel, Scotland and Slovenia all lag only fractionally behind.

Changes to the structure of the qualifying tournament mean that several major sides have slipped in the list. With two host nations the next European Championship, Switzerland and Austria, there will be six groups of seven teams drawn in Montreux with a final group of eight.

Two teams from each group will qualify automatically for the 16-nation tournament with no play-off stage in the competition.

The upshot is that several of the Continent's leading football nations have slipped down the seedings list. Italy and Spain will join Germany in the second pot while former champions Denmark as well as Russia will be third seeds.

Ireland were ranked 15th in the draw for the current World Cup campaign which yielded a second seeding because there were eight groups. Had the team managed to maintain the ranking they still would have slipped into the third group of countries but they have obviously done a good deal worse than that.

The difficult is that each drop in the seeding makes subsequent campaigns more difficult and points harder to come by which, in turn, can prompt a further slip in the rankings.

A number of countries, notably Hungary, Iceland and Northern Ireland have found it difficult in recent years to halt their slide once it has started.