Worst In The World: South Asian Football Fun

Saturday, 19 October 2013

South Asian Football Fun – 2013 SAFF Championships

South Asian Football Fun – 2013 SAFF Championships

South Asia’s upcoming 8 team party in Nepal gives an opportunity for Bhutan to try and claw their way off the foot of the World Rankings with a whopping three fixtures, their only fixtures so far in 2013.

Bhutan are in Group B alongside Afghanistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka. Naturally all of these teams are ranked higher than Bhutan, but not so far above that we can’t get a little giddy at the prospect of a little upset here. Afghanistan are the highest ranked at 139, followed by Maldives at 153 and Sri Lanka at 170.

Bhutan’s fixtures are as follows:

2^nd September 2013 v. Afghanistan Halchowk Stadium, Kathmandu, Nepal

4^th September 2013 v. Maldives Halchowk Stadium, Kathmandu, Nepal

6^th September 2013 v. Sri Lanka Halchowk Stadium, Kathmandu, Nepal

The other group is made up of Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

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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.