FIFA Rankings - A laughing stock?
By Graham Barnstaple
September 5 2012
Despite beating Australia comprehensively last month Scotland have dropped one place in the FIFA World rankings, does that make any sense?
Scotlandhave dropped to 47th in the FIFA rankings despite beating much higher rankedAustralia in a friendly last month. This doesn’t make any sense to me considering we rose 7 places in June after being hammered byUSA in May!
I know there is a complicated algorithm that calculates the rankings, but surely something needs to be looked at if this is the case, particularly as this is the co-efficient which is used to come up with the seedings for tournaments.
The other anachronism is the fact Englandare ranked 3rd behind onlySpain andGermany, again this beggars belief. The top ten only has two non-European sides in there, which maybe shows that the European region is seen as stronger than any other, and the weighting in the scores reflects this.
If Englandare truly third in the world then why don’t they reach semi finals of tournaments on a regular basis? Because in truth they are not the 3rd best team in the World! They have a habit of only losing two one game every two years, and that is the one that sees them knocked out in the Quarter Final of any tournament!
Maybe FIFA need to look at using only competitive games to calculate their rankings and stop taking friendlies into consideration, particularly as teams chop and change their sides for these games.
Leagues around the world do not take friendlies into consideration, and you don’t qualify for European competitions by winning friendlies!!
Time for change
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