Worst In The World: San Marino back into the firing line

Saturday 19 October 2013

San Marino back into the firing line

This week sees San Marino’s hapless heroes entering the World Cup fray again with a double header of fixtures. A trip to Lviv in Ukraine is first up on Friday night for the first of two meetings with Ukraine in the next few weeks. Then on Tuesday it’s back home to entertain Poland. Hopes are not high.

This will be the first ever meeting between Ukraine and San Marino, but the nation ranked 28^th in the world are unlikely to be worried about this one.

By contrast Tuesday sees the 8^th meeting between Poland and San Marino, with the Sammarinese yet to find the net in the previous 7 defeats, with 28 goals finding the San Marino net.

Things have actually got worse over the years, after the first meeting in 1993 in a World Cup qualifier saw a mere 1-0 win for Poland in Lodz. But a 2010 World Cup qualifier in Kielce in 2009 saw a whopping 10-0 win for the Poles.

An interesting nugget of trivia? Poland have never qualified for a tournament when San Marino have been in their qualifying group. This is the fourth time they’ve been drawn together, and Poland’s qualification hopes are on a knife edge. History to repeat itself? You read it here first.

Most recently the teams meet back in march when Poland won 5-0 in Warsaw, but San Marino came damn close to scoring with a one-on-one breakaway sadly being saved.

Previous meetings:

28^th April 1993 WC Qual Lodz Poland 1-0 San Marino

19^th May 2003 WC Qual Serravalle San Marino 0-3 Poland

7^th Sept 2002 EC Qual Serravalle San Marino 0-2 Poland

2^nd April 2003 EC Qual Ostrowiec Poland 5-0 San Marino

10^th Sept 2008 WC Qual Serravalle San Marino 0-2 Poland

1^st April 2009 WC Qual Kielce Poland 10-0 San Marino

26^th March 2013 WC Qual Warsaw Poland 5-0 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.