Worst In The World: An Historic Win! - American Samoa 2 Tonga 1

Wednesday 23 November 2011

An Historic Win! - American Samoa 2 Tonga 1

American Samoa 2–1 Tonga

22^nd November 2011

J.S. Blatter Stadium, Apia, Samoa

Oceania World Cup Qualifying Round 1

American Samoa, long- standing (joint) World’s Worst nation and without a win or even a draw in their entire FIFA affiliated history finally broke their duck last night after 30 consecutive losses with a truly historic win over Tonga.

The Samoans took the lead just before half-time thanks to a long range shot from Ramin Ott, and doubled it midway through the second half when Shalom Luani chipped the Tongan keeper.
This result, as well as giving a 100% win record to new national team boss Dutchman Thomas Rongen, guarantees American Samoa will climb up the world rankings although the result will be too late for the latest rankings release.

It also of course gives them a real chance of progressing through to the next round of Oceania World Cup qualification which would be truly astonishing.

Before they disappear off into the lofty heights of one or two places off the bottom of the rankings table next month we’ll look over their amazing time as World’s Worst, but that’s for later. Right now let’s just celebrate this historic first ever win for American Samoa.

Next up will be the Cook Islands on 24^th November before the clash of the Samoas on 26^th November.

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What's This All About?

It’s all too easy to focus on the successful teams in international football, Spain, Brazil, Germany etc. We all know what’s going on with them, usually winning, and can easily follow their crowning glories on the international stage. But what about life at the other end of the scale?

FIFA’s world rankings allow us to easily see who is officially the worst national football team in the world, and this site simply follows that team (or teams) until they manage to drag themselves kicking and screaming from the foot of the world rankings to be replaced by someone even worse. And then we follow them instead.

In the past the FIFA rankings made it clear who was the very worst of all, as the complex ranking formula rarely caused a tie for last place. Since 2006 the formula has been rather simplified, I won’t go into detail but many factors were removed to make things easier to understand. The result though is that down at the bottom of the rankings we often now have a cluster of ineptitude (or should it be a splat of ineptitude?) with several nations judged to equally as useless as each other for the simple reason that they lose all their games. In the past they’d have received some credit for a narrow defeat against a top side, but no more. To get off the bottom they are going to have to win or draw a match, something that often proves beyond most of them.

We’re here to highlight their struggles against hopelessness, and bring the occasional heart warming story of marginal success.