Worst In The World: Gibraltar Announce First Official Fixtures

Friday, 1 November 2013

Gibraltar Announce First Official Fixtures

While we are yet to know if FIFA will accept Gibraltar as a full member, and therefore give them a World Ranking, UEFA’s newest national team have announced their first set of official UEFA sanctioned fixtures.

These matches are preparation for Gibraltar’s first foray into European Championship qualification, the draw for which will take place early in 2014.

The following fixtures have been arranged:

19^th November 2013 Faro, Portugal v. Slovakia

1^st March 2014 Victoria Stadium, Gibraltar v. Faroe Islands

5^th March 2014 Victoria Stadium, Gibraltar v. Estonia

26^th May 2014 Tallinn, Estonia v. Estonia

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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.