FIFA rankings - why they are important and how to beat the system

[youllneverwalkalone]

Mexico and the US definitely the ones beating the system!

[Kent]

6 hours ago, MtlMario said:

I'm sure we'll beat Panama in Oct. but would not a tie move us ahead of them with the points almost even?

I don't know this for certain, but I would be shocked if it would be mathematically possible for a team to pass another team by tying them. If Canada ties Panama I believe we take 0.002 points away from them, which isn't enough to pass them. Since our ranking points are virtually identical, that means a draw is what's expected, so that happening gets both teams about 0.00 points.

[archer21]

10 hours ago, Kent said:

When I first read your 35 point swing assumption I thought you were way off. I was thinking the expected result was always going to be between 0 and 1. However, I looked at the current rankings and found a team that had a single friendly in the window before it and looked at their change. El Salvador gained 22 points for beating Guatemala in a friendly (and Guatemala lost 22 points as well). So there really can be pretty significant swings.

Guatemala would've been at 1392 prior to this game, with ES at 1215. So there was a pretty big gap between those teams (177 points).

There's only a 36 point gap between Canada and USA. So you'd expect we would gain somewhere between 17.5 and 22. The difference between Canada and USA is about 20% of the difference between ES and Guatemala so I'd say we'd probably gain about 18.5 points. The USA would lose the same amount.

This puts both teams around 1787 points (1787.5 for Canada, 1786.5 for USA but the starting numbers are rounded already so who knows what the actual value is). I'm not sure how they do expected results against non-CONCACAF teams but you'd logically think USA would be expected to beat New Zealand. If that's true, USA would lose a point or 2 and we'd gain a point or 2 for drawing Mexico. I'd be shocked if we don't move passed USA in the CONCACAF rankings.

Edit: just looked at the link sent by @shorty and home field advantage is taken into account too, so it's possible we gain more than 18.5 (ES Guatemala was neutral site in the USA).

Edited September 12 by archer21

[Obinna]

1 hour ago, archer21 said:

 

Edit: just looked at the link sent by @shorty and home field advantage is taken into account too, so it's possible we gain more than 18.5 (ES Guatemala was neutral site in the USA).

That probably explains why USA has generally edged out Mexico in the FIFA rankings, but Mexico has maintained a cushion ahead of USA in the CONCACAF rankings.

The USA basically play all their games at home, so when they do lose it hurts more.

Meanwhile, Mexico rarely play at home, with the vast majority of their matches taking playing on "neutral" ground. So, if they lose they are affected less, relatively speaking.

[mpg_29]

46 minutes ago, Obinna said:

That probably explains why USA has generally edged out Mexico in the FIFA rankings, but Mexico has maintained a cushion ahead of USA in the CONCACAF rankings.

The USA basically play all their games at home, so when they do lose it hurts more.

Meanwhile, Mexico rarely play at home, with the vast majority of their matches taking playing on "neutral" ground. So, if they lose they are affected less, relatively speaking.

Well technically...but not in terms of fan support.

[ahmedou]

This topic is the maths topic. I'll let y'all do the calculations.

Edited September 13 by ahmedou

[Kent]

Good news, the CONCACAF Rankings have been updated!

But the bad news is that they were updated to August 31st, and as a result of their being no games in August, the rankings are unchanged

[Kent]

2 minutes ago, Kent said:

Good news, the CONCACAF Rankings have been updated!

But the bad news is that they were updated to August 31st, and as a result of their being no games in August, the rankings are unchanged

Thinking about this a bit more with my conspiracy hat on, maybe this is the first step, "Destroy the evidence". I pointed out earlier the 22 points that changed hands from a single friendly between El Salvador and Guatemala. The only thing this recent update does is erase the change in points from the previous rankings. So now we can no longer see evidence of this 44 point swing. Now they can update their opaque formula and give us not enough points to pass USA.

If we aren't ahead of USA from the September rankings, we riot.

[maplebanana]

On 9/11/2024 at 7:21 PM, Kent said:

I don't know this for certain, but I would be shocked if it would be mathematically possible for a team to pass another team by tying them. If Canada ties Panama I believe we take 0.002 points away from them, which isn't enough to pass them. Since our ranking points are virtually identical, that means a draw is what's expected, so that happening gets both teams about 0.00 points.

I put together this plot a few years back when we were trying to scramble for FIFA points before '22 format was changed. From this, I think you are correct. The slope of these curves at any point is much smaller than 0.5 (it's more like 0.01 for a friendly), which would be required for a team to surpass the other with a draw. For example, if team A is 100 ranking pts behind team B and they draw in a friendly, team A gains ~1 pt and team B loses ~1 pt. Not even close to enough to swing. 

This is, of course, not the case for a win, since even a 0 pt ranking differential results in +5 / -5 swing:

 

[maplebanana]

Also, aren't the new FIFA rankings supposed to come out today? It says Sept 18 on the FIFA site, but I don't see an update.

[Neil R.]

54 minutes ago, Kent said:

Thinking about this a bit more with my conspiracy hat on, maybe this is the first step, "Destroy the evidence". I pointed out earlier the 22 points that changed hands from a single friendly between El Salvador and Guatemala. The only thing this recent update does is erase the change in points from the previous rankings. So now we can no longer see evidence of this 44 point swing. Now they can update their opaque formula and give us not enough points to pass USA.

If we aren't ahead of USA from the September rankings, we riot.

I don't know if we've passed the US or not with the September window, but my first thought was, if we haven't, and you wanted as few windows as possible to be used in the calculation for quarter-final seeding, you'd start updating the rankings so that the previous month's matches weren't included until the middle of the following month.

Providing the August update in mid-September could be the start of something where the October matches aren't included in a ranking update until mid-November, which means they're not part of the October 2024 rankings that determine the quarter-final seeding.

Hopefully the more charitable explanation is what's really happened. With nothing happening in August, they forgot to do it and just realized it now.

Edited Thursday at 05:07 AM by Neil R.

[ahmedou]

8 hours ago, Kent said:

Good news, the CONCACAF Rankings have been updated!

But the bad news is that they were updated to August 31st, and as a result of their being no games in August, the rankings are unchanged

Good news, we made great calculations.

Bad new, all of our calculations was for nothing. Time wasted.

😄

[Kent]

8 hours ago, maplebanana said:

Also, aren't the new FIFA rankings supposed to come out today? It says Sept 18 on the FIFA site, but I don't see an update.

They are out now.

[RJB]

In the "Match Window" column, it doesn't seem to show any results for most of the South American teams.  Does anyone know what's up there?

[Kent]

Random fact of the day. Back in the bad old days, several tiny countries with populations less than 1 million were ranked ahead of us. Since I started keeping track this peaked at 8 countries with a population less than 1 million ranked ahead of us in late 2015. There hasn't been any countries that small ranked ahead of us for more than 3 years now, ever since we passed Iceland in September 2021.

[Unnamed Trialist]

1 hour ago, Kent said:

Random fact of the day. Back in the bad old days, several tiny countries with populations less than 1 million were ranked ahead of us. Since I started keeping track this peaked at 8 countries with a population less than 1 million ranked ahead of us in late 2015. There hasn't been any countries that small ranked ahead of us for more than 3 years now, ever since we passed Iceland in September 2021.

Cool stat. 

Inspired me so I just checked, 18-19 teams ahead of us are countries with a smaller population. Two basically, Morocco and Ukraine, have basically similar populations. The lowest population of those ahead is Wales just over 3 million, then Uruguay at 3.4 million. The next lowest in the top 50, below us, are Qatar and Norway. Scotland is similar to this latter.

I think what it really says is that population need not be the key factor at all, that having a quality program, creating talent, moving it through pro systems, competing, is what is important. 

Edited Thursday at 02:41 PM by Unnamed Trialist

[Kingston]

2 hours ago, Kent said:

They are out now.

So if we beat Panama in our upcoming friendly, our FIFA ranking will finally catch up to the fact that we are one of the big three at the top of CONCACAF.

[Obinna]

5 minutes ago, Kingston said:

So if we beat Panama in our upcoming friendly, our FIFA ranking will finally catch up to the fact that we are one of the big three at the top of CONCACAF.

Not necessarily. Panama could lose to us and beat the USA, which would keep them ahead of us in terms of FIFA rankings.

Funny enough, that outcome could keep us ahead of the USA in the CONCACAF rankings if USA also suffers a loss to Mexico.

Edited Thursday at 02:58 PM by Obinna

[Mihairokov]

1 hour ago, Unnamed Trialist said:

Cool stat. 

Inspired me so I just checked, 18-19 teams ahead of us are countries with a smaller population. Two basically, Morocco and Ukraine, have basically similar populations. The lowest population of those ahead is Wales just over 3 million, then Uruguay at 3.4 million. The next lowest in the top 50, below us, are Qatar and Norway. Scotland is similar to this latter.

I think what it really says is that population need not be the key factor at all, that having a quality program, creating talent, moving it through pro systems, competing, is what is important. 

It's a fun experiment until you realize it's all basically circumstantial. Some countries have tons of sports and international teams, Canada included, and some only develop a few, or one. Uruguay is a pretty popular example of a country "punching above their weight", but outside of soccer and maybe rugby they don't really field great international teams. The same could be said for Iceland, or any other small country that has one specifically good sports team. It's sort of like saying Fiji doesn't produce when all of their athletes play rugby, or India doesn't produce when all their athletes play cricket.

Like yes, Morocco and Canada are roughly the same population, but they really only have a soccer team whereas we have soccer, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, etc. teams...

As i'm sure we're all aware, if these things were based on population they wouldn't be very interesting.

Edited Thursday at 03:49 PM by Mihairokov

[Kent]

59 minutes ago, Unnamed Trialist said:

Cool stat. 

Inspired me so I just checked, 18-19 teams ahead of us are countries with a smaller population. Two basically, Morocco and Ukraine, have basically similar populations. The lowest population of those ahead is Wales just over 3 million, then Uruguay at 3.4 million. The next lowest in the top 50, below us, are Qatar and Norway. Scotland is similar to this latter.

I think what it really says is that population need not be the key factor at all, that having a quality program, creating talent, moving it through pro systems, competing, is what is important. 

Population isn't the only factor, but it is for sure a factor. For example, there are 35 countries in the world with a higher population than Canada, and 16 of them are ranked ahead of us in FIFA rankings. There are 170ish countries with lower populations than us, and only 21 of those countries are ranked ahead of us in FIFA rankings.

So that's 46% of bigger countries ranked ahead of us, and 12ish% of smaller countries ranked ahead of us. If it wasn't a factor at all, those percentages should be similar. Population and soccer infrastructure are the biggest factors I would say, where infrastructure encompasses a lot. Leagues for players to play in, passion for the sport and the knowledge in how to push the game forward, etc. You can get small countries with great soccer infrastructure/culture like Uruguay perform well, and you can get big countries with poor soccer infrastructure like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. perform poorly. But the best soccer nations tend to be big countries that have great soccer infrastructure (like every World Cup winner other than Uruguay). 

[archer21]

51 minutes ago, Obinna said:

Not necessarily. Panama could lose to us and beat the USA, which would keep them ahead of us in terms of FIFA rankings.

Funny enough, that outcome could keep us ahead of the USA in the CONCACAF rankings if USA also suffers a loss to Mexico.

I can't imagine that would be the case. They'd have a slight positive gain from that result, but not as much as our gain would be from a 1 win with no loss or draw window.

[Kent]

5 minutes ago, archer21 said:

I can't imagine that would be the case. They'd have a slight positive gain from that result, but not as much as our gain would be from a 1 win with no loss or draw window.

Yeah, if we beat Panama, we take 5 points from them, and if they beat USA they get about 6.2 points from USA. So that would put Panama at +1.2 in the window, and we would be +5. So we would pass them in that scenario. We would also pass them in FIFA rankings if we draw them and they lose to USA.

[Unnamed Trialist]

Revising the historical rankings, apart from being okay back in 1996, even the Gold Cup win did not vault us that much.

So in recent years, we reached our peak in February 2022, low 30s, then relaxed in the latter fixtures of WC qualifying. Losing in Panama actually hurt us. Which probably hurt our seeding for the tournament, landing us in the hardest group (we were on the threshold, it is not entirely clear where we had to be in ranking before the draw, and how we could have ensured that).

We faltered in the WC lead-up, and of course not getting any points from a tournament where even a draw vs. a superior rival means bigger points.

Now we are trying to climb back up, but oddly a team that missed the WC (with a bit of bad fortune), and did not go as deep in Copa, is still ahead of us. They've managed the ranking points better than us, credit to them. 

I would love for us to dig in a bit and get to our highest ranking ever, going under 30th.

[Treppy2]

4 hours ago, Kent said:

Random fact of the day. Back in the bad old days, several tiny countries with populations less than 1 million were ranked ahead of us. Since I started keeping track this peaked at 8 countries with a population less than 1 million ranked ahead of us in late 2015. There hasn't been any countries that small ranked ahead of us for more than 3 years now, ever since we passed Iceland in September 2021.

Speaking of Iceland and small populations... when Iceland qualified for the World Cup in 2018, I checked to see if there were any countries with smaller populations that might be able to qualify for the World Cup finals one day. The only country with a realistic chance would be Vanuatu (population of ~320,000 compared to Iceland's ~380,000). They'd need to beat New Zealand to get OFC's one spot - and they did that when they qualified for the U-20 World Cup in 2017.

[Obinna]

2 hours ago, archer21 said:

I can't imagine that would be the case. They'd have a slight positive gain from that result, but not as much as our gain would be from a 1 win with no loss or draw window.

Delete. See where I went wrong 👍 

Edited Thursday at 06:43 PM by Obinna