Worst In The World: Gibraltar admitted into UEFA

Friday, 31 May 2013

Gibraltar admitted into UEFA

In a move which may lead to a new name at the bottom of the World Rankings, Gibraltar have been admitted into UEFA and will compete in the next European Championships in 2016. Well, they’ll be in the qualifying round beginning in Autumn 2014 anyway.

Similar in population terms to San Marino, they will of course struggle to make an impact, however a glance at recent results shows a 3-0 win over the Faroe Islands two years ago. The Faroese are a couple of notches above the likes of San Marino, so perhaps Gibraltar will be able to avoid becoming a basement dweller in rankings terms.

This is all slightly premature from our point of view currently though, since it is only UEFA that have admitted Gibraltar, not FIFA. So there will be no world ranking unless that changes.

No other UEFA members are outside of FIFA so perhaps it is only a matter of time, however there are cases of other national sides being part of their confederation but not in FIFA. Guadeloupe and Martinique in CONCACAF spring to mind.

That remains to be seen, but Gibraltar will now be no doubt dreaming of facing either England or Spain in the next Euro qualifiers.

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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.