Worst In The World: June 2014

Tuesday 24 June 2014

Friendly Result: San Marino 0-3 Albania

San Marino 0-3 Albania

International Friendly

Sunday 8^th June 2014

Stadio Olimpico di Serravalle

San Marino had kept Albania at bay for almost half an hour, restricting them to a few long range efforts but nothing too dangerous. San Marino even managed one or two attacks of their own, though naturally none of them were particularly threatening.

San Marino to play friendly with Albania

Just ahead of the World Cup Finals in Brazil, a tournament of little interest to our intrepid heroes at the foot of the football world, San Marino will host Albania in a friendly match in Serravalle on Sunday 8^th June.

The two have only met once before, in a friendly match in 2006. On that occasion Albania claimed victory with a comfortable 3-0 scoreline. A beating, but hardly a bad one.

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.