The FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking was introduced in August, 1993. Since then, it has become a regular part of international sports reports and an indicator for FIFA’s member associations to find out where their respective teams stand in world football’s pecking order and how they are progressing.
However, there has been a certain amount of criticism that its calculation formula is too complicate and so, it was decided in 2005 to revise the ranking in order to simplify the way in which it is calculated.
The most important change to the calculation of the ranking is that it will no longer take into account the last eight years of results but only four. At the same time, all of the other factors previously taking into account (result, importance of match, strength of opponents, regional strength, number of matches considered) were tested, analysed and, in some cases, totally revised. In fact, two of the factors that were previously used (goals scored and home advantage) will no longer have any impact on the ranking.
At the moment, Brazil is the top team with Argentina and Italy very close by. Germany and France are in the race for 4th, while amazingly Croatia lies in at 6th place.
My opinion:
The thing that I don’t understand about the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Rankings is that it doesn’t make sense most of the time. How can Croatia be that high? Are they better than Holland, Spain, Portugal? I don’t think so. Another miscalculation in my eyes is how low Turkey(22), Nigeria(26), and Japan(41) are. Should Romania, who did not go to the World Cup in 2006, be ranked 13th in the world? These are all very weird to me.
Last of all, I feel that the Rankings favor the European National Teams. If you look at numbers 1-30, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia, Bulgaria, Scotland, Serbia, and Romania, are being shown that they are a lot better than: Ivory Coast(28), Japan(41), Ghana(43), Iran(44), Australia(49), S.Korea(50), Saudi Arabia(51), and Ecuador(55).
Top 45 Rankings [read more]
Kon you are right. And when you look at these rankings you must look at it as ranking “groups”. Like you can really say a number 30 is better than a 35. You must take it by every three or so teams or so. Like you can’t say that Italy is number 3, you should say they are one of the top 5 teams in the world. It’s because when you are that high on the list it is very hard to rank someone. Good article.
By: kevink245 on August 22, 2007
at 7:51 pm