Worst In The World: Bhutan v. Maldives Preview

Saturday, 19 October 2013

Bhutan v. Maldives Preview

4^th September 2013

Bhutan v. Maldives

SAFF Championships Group Stage

Halchowk Stadium, Kathmandu, Nepal

History and current form both suggest an imminent tonking for Bhutan at the hands of the Maldives in the second group match at this year’s SAFF Championships.

Two previous meetings have seen 11 goals, all of them Maldivian. And as recently as yesterday, Maldives put 10 past Sri Lanka, while Bhutan lost to Afghanistan. I’m going out on a limb here and suggesting another sizeable scoreline in favour of the men from the pretty atolls. A Bhutan goal would be nice.

Past meetings:

11^th January 2003 SAFF Gold Cup Group Stage Dhaka, Bangladesh Maldives 6-0 Bhutan

18^th April 2009 AFC Challenge Cup Qualifier Male, Maldives Maldives 5-0 Bhutan

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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.