Worst In The World: San Marino's World Cup Qualifying Fixtures

Thursday 8 December 2011

San Marino's World Cup Qualifying Fixtures

Back on the fixtures front, most of the European qualifying group fixtures have been announced, including San Marino’s fixtures in Group H, which are as follows:

11th September 2012: San Marino v. Montenegro
12th October 2012: England v. San Marino
16th October 2012: San Marino v. Moldova
14th November 2012: Montenegro v. San Marino
22nd March 2013: San Marino v. England
26th March 2013: Poland v. San Marino
6th September 2013: Ukraine v. San Marino
10th September 2013: San Marino v. Poland
11th October 2013: Moldova v. San Marino
15th October 2013: San Marino v. Ukraine

Past history suggests that San Marino are more than likely to remain as one of our Worst in the World throughout these fixtures, with possibly the games against Moldova giving the greatest chance of an upset.

Our other European representatives, Andorra, haven’t yet had their fixtures decided. They have been drawn in group D alongside Netherlands, Turkey, Hungary, Romania and Estonia, a group that suggests prospects of any ranking points are unlikely.

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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.