Måns Zelmerlöw (Sweden 2015)

With two victories and another five songs in top 5, Sweden is best performing country this past decade. Russia comes in as second. We take a look at how each country have done the past ten editions of the Eurovision Song Contest.

As the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest ended, a whole decade came to an end. For next year’s contest in the Netherlands, we will start a fresh new decade with great entries, controversial victories, fantastic outfits, a whole lot of drama, but also a lot of fun – and we can’t wait for it to begin!

To close this current decade, we’ve thrown all the results together and created a list of the best ranking countries these past ten years. To find out which countries performed best at the Eurovision Song Contest, we calculated an Average Relative Position for each country, for every year in the past 10 years. The full calculation method is explained below the list.

It probably comes as no surprise to many that Sweden is on top, but there are a few more interesting things to pay attention to. We’ll highlight a few here:

All three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) are in top 10.

Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia are all to be found in top 15.

Turkey comes in as 7th on the list. They did score rather well – until they left after the 2012 contest.

Bosnia & Herzegovina participated four times this decade. Their results were good enough to earn them a 12th place.

Only 9 out of the 23 best scoring countries in this Eurovision decade participated the maximum 10 times. Another 8 countries have been out one year.

Eurovision 2010 – 2019: Best scoring countries this decade

With appearances from a total of 46 participants this decade, we have divided them into two half’s; best scoring and worst scoring. Below you find the 23 best scoring this decade – and tomorrow, we’ll bring you the remaining countries, who are the in the worst scoring half.

Rank Country Average Relative Position Times participated 1 Sweden 20,36% 10 2 Russia 24,35% 9 3 Australia 25,05% 5 4 Italy 27,54% 9 5 Ukraine 30,45 8 6 Azerbaijan 31,47% 10 7 Turkey 34,41% 3 8 Denmark 42,32% 10 9 Romania 43,11% 9 10 Norway 47,25% 10 11 Serbia 48,24% 9 12 Bosnia & Herzegovina 49,27% 4 13 Hungary 50,50% 9 14 Armenia 51,08 9 15 The Netherlands 51,61% 10 16 Greece 52,07% 10 17 Belgium 53,05% 10 18 Bulgaria 55,12% 7 19 Moldova 56,01% 10 20 Czech Republic 58,28% 5 21 Austria 58,43% 9 22 Cyprus 58,79% 9 23 Estonia 61,02 10

These Relative Positions are calculated by dividing a country’s actual position by the lowest possible rank this country could have gotten that year, each minus 1. Semi-final positions are appended to the bottom of the Grand Final scoreboard, in such a way that an 11th position in a Semi-final results in a 27th position. The lowest possible rank in the 2019 first Semi-final would be 35. This would give that particular 11th position a relative rank of 29.41%.

The sum of all relative positions is then divided by the number of times that country took part, to come to the above listed Average Relative Positions. This results in the fairest possible way to compare Semi Final positions against Grand Final positions in the reality of Eurovision where not all countries come from a semi final, and not all semi finals have the same number of participants.

Stay tuned as we tomorrow finish this with the 23 worst scoring countries this past decade.