4ZakeN87 Profile Joined June 2011 Sweden 1052 Posts Last Edited: 2013-05-25 12:57:53 #1 Here is my attempt to a little more objective approach to answer the question of which countries that are performing best behind South Korea in SC2. So I have simply summarized prize earnings (PE) of all the pro players from the 16 countries that have above 500.00$ in total earnings. The idea is then of course that prize money is an indicator of “skill”. I defined a “pro” as player with above 1500$ in prize earnings. Pro players from the entire time span of SC2 are included, thus does the amount of pro players included former pro players as well e.g Jinro and Idra. Meaning that the list does not necessarily reflect who is performing best now, but which countries that has been performing best through SC2 “history”. The prize money statistics I got from SC2earnings.com



Top 16 nations by prize earnings

Sweden: 350,822$

France: 269,905$

Poland: 188,945$

US: 188,655$

Ukraine: 187,130$

Germany: 179,855$

China: 167,319$

Canada: 159,580$

Spain: 102,195$

Taiwan: 98,390$

NL: 89,050$

Russia: 70,410$

Norway: 66,400$

Australia: 65,125$

UK: 51,105$

Finland: 50,990$





Top 16 nations by number of pro players

US: 24

Sweden: 14

Germany: 13

China: 13

Canada: 10

France: 8

Taiwan: 8

Australia: 8

Poland: 6

Ukraine: 6

Russia: 6

UK: 6

Spain: 5

Norway: 4

Finland: 4

NL: 2





Since people ask about Korea, here is a value I calculated for the WoL period a while back.

Total earnings Korea in WoL: $4,761,164 or 65.6% of the total prize pool $7,237,937



Additional calculations by Sjokola

Prize money per million people (per capita * 1.000.000)

Sweden: 36.645

Norway: 13.113

Finland: 9.380

NL: 5.305

Poland: 4.903

Canada: 4.552

Taiwan: 4.216

France: 4.112

Ukraine: 4.110

Australia: 2.828

Germany: 2.193

Spain: 2.172

UK: 809

US: 601

Russia: 491

China: 124



Progamers per hundred million people (per capita * 100.000.000 rounded off)

Sweden: 146

Norway: 79

Finland: 74

Australia: 35

Taiwan: 34

Canada: 29

Germany: 16

Poland: 16

Ukraine: 13

France: 12

NL: 12

Spain: 11

UK: 9

US: 8

Russia: 4

China: 1



Average prize money per progamer per country

NL: 44.525

France: 33.738

Poland: 31.491

Ukraine: 31.188

Sweden: 25.059

Spain: 20.439

Norway: 16.600

Canada: 15.958

Germany: 13.835

China: 12.871

Finland: 12.748

Taiwan: 12.299

Russia: 11.735

UK: 8.518

Australia: 8.141

US: 7.861





Pros and cons with the ranking

So as many might have suspected Sweden came out on top of the score board, followed by France (Stephano & friends), the third place is narrowly taken by Poland with US and Ukraine close behind.



Will there are some issues with this method do I still believe that the it is a reasonable indicator of performance of a country. If you for instance look at the top 5 countries are those countries the ones that are being mentioned 99% of the times when discussing which nations are the best outside of South Korea. This of course is not a coincidence.



So regarding the issues with this method:

The first issue being that the earnings from international competition and earnings from regional tournaments are not separated. Thus if you use prize earning as a measurement of skill can a countries “skill” be boosted by having a large prize pool in regional tournaments. To be able to accommodate for this (to some extent) I sampled the origin of each countries prize earnings. After some quick research I identified four categories of countries:

Low regional PE (0-5%), Medium regional PE (5-15%), High regional PE (15-40%) and Isolated nations.



Low regional PE: Poland, Ukraine, Canada and Netherlands. I don’t know if local tournaments exist, but if they do they are not included in SC2earnings.com and thus neither in this ranking.

Medium regional PE: Sweden, France, Russia, US, Spain, Finland and UK

High regional PE: Germany, Taiwan and Norway



Thus if one would make a list and base it solely on prize earnings from international competition Canada would for instance be above Germany and Norway would not have made the cut into the list (dat oil money!). Most countries would however remain in the same position even with subtracted regional prize money.



Isolated nations: Australia and China

They both above 50% regional earnings but on the other hand are they also isolated from much of the international competition. So prize earnings are not a suitable measurement of skill in their case, as the amount of prize money does not relate well to their international performance.



The second issue revolves around USA. It is for several reasons very hard to determine the skill of SC2 in US. First there is the issue that close to all American organizers has an urge to flood each and every one of their tournaments with 50 top Koreans, usually ending with a slaughter of the NA scene. Meanwhile the US scene has a low interaction towards everything else, making it very hard to determine how they match up against other nations. Then there is the fact that US has a great width of players, more pros than any other nation, but few top caliber players. USA is the only country that has this distribution of skill. The fact is that even if you have 20 decent pros they are not going to earn much money in tournament with 20+ pro Koreans. Therefor US are for instance behind Poland in this list. This is because Nerchio and Mana has earned prize money equal to the amount of the top 23 US players combined. So how do the performance of 2 top caliber players compare to the performance of 20 good players? You tell me.



To conclude are there issues with this measurement and thus is it not suitable to draw conclusions based on minor difference within it. I however think that the larger patterns are correct. I for instance don’t think it is a coincidence that Sweden happens to end on top (let the flaming commence), that Germany is above UK and so forth.



Anyway, if people think this is interesting I could keep updating it. Maybe after every WCS season to see which nations that are climbing the ladder and which that are declining. "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" Einstein