Group Stages Analysis

The first stage of the World Cup is over.
This is the perfect time to do an analysis of all 32 teams before the knockout stages affect the statistics.

The cleanest team of the World Cup so far is Spain, having not had any cards.
The roughest team is Chile with 12 cards – all yellow, including one player who received two yellow cards in the same game. Even if you consider red cards to be worth twice as much as yellows, they still come last. Ironically, they played their last game against Spain! This is an average of four cards per game.
The teams who scored the most goals are Portugal and Argentina, with seven goals each, although all of Portugal's came in the match against North Korea, whereas Argentina's were spread out over several games.
The worst-scoring teams are Algeria and Honduras, who didn't manage a single World Cup goal.
The worst-scoring teams to make it through to the knockout stages are Ghana and England, with two goals each.
There are two teams who have managed clean sheets: Uruguay and Portugal. With a record like that, their qualification is not surprising.
The worst goalkeeping record goes (unsurprisingly) to North Korea, with twelve goals scored against them.
The worst goalkeeping record for a qualifying team is South Korea, who had six goals scored against them – one an own goal.
In terms of wins, draws, and losses, the best record is 3-0-0 to Argentina and Netherlands.
The worst team is Cameroon with 0-0-3.
The worst record for a qualifying team is 1-1-1 for several teams: Mexico, South Korea, Ghana and Slovakia.

So far, all but five of the FIFA referees assigned to the Word Cup have led a game: Joel AGULIAR of El Salvador, Martin HANSSON of Sweden, Subkhiddin MOHD SALLEH of Malaysia, Peter O LEARY of New Zealand and Martin VAZQUEZ of Uruguay have not refereed a game, although they have been fourth officials.
The nicest referee – with one card given out in total (although he's only controlled one game) – is New Zealand's Michael HESTER.
The nastiest referee is Khalil AL GHAMDI, with an average of eight cards per game including one red card.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the referees have made bad decisions. It's up to FIFA to decide, having watched the matches, which referee is best to supervise the final match. The ITV commentators claim that Howard WEBB (ENG) has been the best referee so far, but of course if England make it to the final, he won't be able to referee the game.