Worst In The World: End of the World

Saturday 19 October 2013

End of the World – October 2013

San Marino’s final two fixtures in this World Cup campaign take place in the coming days, with a visit to the next worst team in the group, Moldova, on Friday followed by a home match with Ukraine next week.

Coming off a goal scoring performance last time out against Poland, San Marino will be looking to repeat the unlikely feat in Chisinau. Surely they can’t bang in another one can they?

They’ve not managed to breach the Moldovan net in four previous meetings so hopes aren’t high, but Moldova are rather inept themselves so let’s not rule out all hope.

Earlier in this campaign, Moldova came to Serravalle and won 2-0, so I would hope that San Marino can at the very least keep the game fairly competitive. The first meeting between the two was even closer, a mere 1-0 defeat in 2000.

Previous meetings:

26^th April 2000 Friendly Serravalle San Marino 0-1 Moldova

12^th Oct 2010 EC Qual Serravalle San Marino 0-2 Moldova

11^th Oct 2011 EC Qual Chisinau Moldova 4-0 San Marino

16^th Oct 2012 WC Qual Serravalle San Marino 0-2 Moldova

But then lurking a few days later is a meeting with mighty Ukraine, who of course hammered San Marino 9-0 only last month. Let’s just say that anything less than that will be a decent outcome for San Marino. Ukraine will go into this game needing a win to try and steal top spot, and automatic qualification, from England, so they are unlikely to let up on our hapless heroes.

Previous meetings:

6^th Sept 2013 WC Qual Lviv Ukraine 9-0 San Marino

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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.