Worst In The World: New FIFA Rankings

Wednesday 23 November 2011

New FIFA Rankings

The latest FIFA World Rankings were released today, and thanks to the vagaries of international time zones, this was all updated prior to the results of the Oceania World Cup wins for American Samoa and Samoa. The significance of that? Their wins aren’t yet reflected in the rankings, and they both remain firmly rooted to the bottom.

The two Samoas can of course look forward to the guarantee of climbing the rankings next month thanks to their respective wins yesterday.

But since the official rankings still lists them as joint last we get to follow all of their Oceania World Cup qualifying group games as official World’s Worst matches.

Both will play again on Thursday 24^th November, and then face each other on Saturday 26^th November.

No change for our other three World’s Worst nations; Andorra, Montserrat and San Marino, none of whom saw any action this month.

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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.