Worst In The World: New World Rankings - great news for Samoa and American Samoa

Saturday 24 December 2011

New World Rankings - great news for Samoa and American Samoa

The latest FIFA World Rankings have been released, and naturally they confirm the rise of Samoa and American Samoa from the foot of the ranking table after both recorded wins in the recent Oceania World Cup qualifying group.

Samoa’s ascent is quite stunning, leaping an incredible 55 places from equal 204^th and last place to now be ranked 149^th in the world. And what is more they are now officially the second highest ranked team in Oceania behind New Zealand. It’s incredible what winning a couple of games when hardly anyone else is playing can do for your ranking!

And as for American Samoa, never having won an official match before, or even drawn one frankly, their rise of 18 places up to 186^th is taking them into nose-bleed territory. A quite magnificent achievement for a nation that has more often than not been firmly rooted to the bottom of the world rankings.

They have also climbed above both Papua New Guinea and Cook Islands (who they beat in November of course) to be ranked 9^th out of 10 in Oceania. Heady days indeed.

This now leaves us with just 3 teams remaining as official Worst in the World; Andorra, San Marino and Montserrat.

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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.