The FIFA ranking system and why England could face the group of death in 2014

So news broke three weeks back or so that England weren’t to be seeded in the top group for the draw of World Cup 2014 in Brazil. The top 7 ranked teams in the world, calculated by FIFA’s ranking system, will join hosts Brazil as the tops seeds. Now, being the pessimistic nation that we are, I’m sure most of us could rack off teams that are better than England and very quickly begin to run out of fingers. Would Switzerland make that list though? I doubt it. The forever neutral, Toblerone munching ski resort, however, managed to sneak into the top seeding group after their qualification campaign, sitting as the seventh best team in the world (according to FIFA) whilst England languish in tenth. We here at howtobet4free decided to brave the minefield that is FIFA policy and try to get to grips with why England weren’t able to qualify with the top seeds – and the answer isn’t as simple as “we ain’t good enough”.

We’ll start off simple. The way the ranking system works is that you get rewarded with points for a win or draw. The better the team you play, the more points you get, and it goes without saying that winning will result in more points than a draw. However, competitive fixtures are worth much more than friendlies, and playing European opposition is more valuable than playing South American opposition, and playing South American opposition is more valuable than playing North American or Asian outfits (as they are judged to have stronger teams). An average of each result is calculated and is contributed towards a total point score. Still with us?

Here is where we get to the ‘shit out of luck’ part. England were drawn against Ukraine and Poland in their World Cup 2014 qualifying group. This isn’t an inherently bad thing, and whilst the results against these two sides weren’t as good as we would have expected, it is more poor fortune than anything that saw England fall in the rankings. If you can cast your mind back to Euro 2012, the tournament took place in Poland and Ukraine. As these two nations hosted the games, neither of them needed to play a single competitive fixture after World Cup 2010 (because they automatically qualify). Because competitive fixtures are skewed to be much more valuable than the friendlies Poland and Ukraine played between 2010 and 2012, their rankings plummeted.

This means that Ukraine were ranked at #23 in the world at the time of World Cup 2010 in South Africa, but by the time England played them in the qualifying campaign, they were ranked #55. This means, regardless of the result, the ranking points on offer for England were drastically less than what Ukraine realistically should offer. The same is applicable to Poland. During the run in to South Africa 2010 when Poland were playing regular competitive fixtures, they hit peaks of #28 in the World. Compared with the middle of the World Cup 2014 qualifying campaign where they were at lows of #75 in the world, with world-beaters like Haiti, Equatorial Guinea and Uzbekistan all above them in the rankings. Flawed system? Yes. Anything England can do about that? Sadly not.

However, no hearty rant on football policy would be complete with a good bit of FA bashing. And this is where we get a bit more technical, allowing us to see the stupidity and the lack of foresight of the English FA. As we mentioned before, the FIFA ranking system heavily weights in favour of competitive fixtures, meaning a competitive European fixture is worth 2.5x as many ranking points as a friendly. This has heavy consequences for England’s national side, who have played 5 friendlies over the last year whereas Switzerland have only played 3. Remember that horrendously dull 1-1 draw against Ireland a few months back? We really don’t blame you if you don’t. Well that was worth just 181 FIFA ranking points. Remember the equally boring victories over San Marino? Those were worth 375 points each. So winning against the worst nation in the world is worth double the points of drawing against a side that qualified for Euro 2012 – as long as it’s a competitive fixture.

This in turn, means that Switzerland improved the ranking points by playing just three friendlies, as more often than not these will hamper the overall ranking average. Indeed, even if Switzerland were to have arranged and won a friendly against Spain, the #1 ranked side in the world, this would still have hurt their overall points score. England didn’t have to beat Ireland to get into the top seven seeds; they just had to not even bother playing. If England decided to just not play the game against Ireland and the draw in Brazil or the loss to Sweden, England would have shot up the rankings from tenth and into the top seven. It’s really that simple.

This complete oversight by the FA could be the difference between the following groups.

Group A: England, Iran, Burkina Faso/Algeria, Bosnia

And

Group B: Brazil, Mexico, Ivory Coast, England.

If this does result in England being in the group of death, then we need to seriously chastise the FA for such poor decision making. It took this blogger just over an hour at his desk to make sense of the system and see the flaws in the FA’s plan – so you’d think Richard Scudamore’s team of fully paid professionals would have been able to spot the gaping flaw too.

Who knows, maybe someone high up in the FA has a bet on Danny Welbeck scoring against Brazil in the first game of World Cup 2014 and will happily retire if this comes in. It makes as much sense as any other reasoning I can think that the FA had, so why not?

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