Worst In The World: Montserrat No Longer Worst In The World!!

Friday 22 March 2013

Montserrat No Longer Worst In The World!! - October 2012

Confirmation came today in the latest FIFA rankings that Montserrat have finally climbed off the bottom of the world rankings, following their stunning 7-0 win over the British Virgin Islands last month. That lone victory, a first in 18 years has earned Montserrat an incredible 66 ranking points and resulted in a climb up to 181^st place in the current rankings table, a climb of 25 places. Utterly astonishing.

Nobody has been stuck at the foot of the rankings as long as Montserrat who have been there since July 2006 (and only off the bottom then thanks to new nations coming along). Quite how we’re going to cope without them I just don’t know.

Still firmly in last place are San Marino, Bhutan and Turks & Caicos Islands, of which only San Marino are in regular action. Don’t expect any of those to be going anywhere anytime soon.

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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.