FIFA Have It Wrong

The latest FIFA rankings came out last Wednesday and it seems Australia has move up 8 places to be now ranked at the 35th best team in the World. We have also moved ahead of Japan to be the number one ranked team in the AFC.

Does it mean anything though?

The ranking system is a complex formula that takes into account matches from the last four years, each year receives a different weighting and results in each year are averaged. The results themselves are also weighted with the result (ie win, loss, draw), importance of the match (ie Friendly vs World Cup Qualifier), Quality of Opponent (ie FIFA Ranking), and Region (ie UEFA vs OFC) taken into account.

The formula heavily favours teams from UEFA and CONMEBOL while punishing teams from OFC, AFC and CAF heavily. This can be seen reflected in the rankings themselves where UEFA and CONMEBOL teams make up 17 of the top 20 teams. In fact we don’t see a team outside UEFA/CONMEBOL until position 13 where Cameroon make an appearance.

You cannot argue with many of the teams ranked in the top 10 but it’s when you see teams like Romania(12), Scotland(17), Bulgaria(18) & Israel(22) that you question whether FIFA has the formula right. Scotland for instance has gone from 59th in the world to 17th since the new ranking system has been introduce.

The fact is teams outside the two favoured confederations have a next to impossible chance of breaking into the top 20. You need to effectively win every match over the four years. If Australia won all three of their remaining matches for this phase of qualifying we would rise to the lofty height of around 30 in the ranking. Even one loss though in the three would mean we stay about where we are. In fact to maintain our ranking Australia cannot afford to play friendlies in the Asian region. So heavily penalised is the AFC a win against Singapore in a friendly match actually losses us points (see calculations below).

Current Australia Average for June 2008 – May 2008 approx. 325
3 (win) x 1 (friendly) x 0.72 (Singapore rank) x 0.85 (AFC Adjustment) x 100 = 184 points

As you can see the total points gained from the Singapore match is actually much lower than our current average for the current year and so we actually lose points because of the match (as it will lower our average).

FIFA needs to take another look at these formulas. If the ranking table is to be at least marginally relevant the penalty applied to AFC and CAF at the very least needs to be adjusted.

,