Thursday, November 21, 2013

Who Had the Hardest Route to WC2014 Qualification?

Which team had the easiest time qualifying for the 2014 World Cup? How about the hardest?

To answer these questions I created an index of achievement. Specifically, I took the October 2013 FIFA World Rankings and used them as the basis for creating an index based on performance in World Cup qualification. I used a simple metric, a team gets all of their opponents ranking points for a win and half of those points for a draw. Of course, a defeat results in zero points. One could of course devise other plausible ways of tallying points.

According to FIFA there were 820 matches in total played in qualification for the 2014 World Cup. Not all teams played the same number of qualifiers, nor did each team face the same quality of opponents.

Here is how the numbers stack up:

1 Argentina 9769
2 Colombia 8172
3 Ecuador 7689
4 Uruguay 7445
5 Chile 6903
6 USA 6546
7 Costa Rica 6156
8 Belgium 6149
9 Honduras 5879
10 Mexico 5734
11 Portugal 4996
12 Croatia 4832
13 Netherlands 4705
14 Italy 4556
15 Switzerland 4293
16 Germany 4161
17 Greece 4151
18 France 4111
19 Australia 4084
20 Iran 3703
21 Spain 3694
22 Japan 3635
23 South Korea 3619
24 Russia 3570
25 Bosnia 3485
26 England 3240
27 Cameroon 3081
28 Algeria 2506
29 Ivory Coast 2161
30 Nigeria 1927
31 Ghana 1919
32 Brazil 0

Brazil obviously had the easiest route to qualification, serving as host and automatically qualifying.  The highest achievers come all from CONMEBOL, with Argentina leading the way. The USA was next highest. Belgium is the highest performer from UEFA.

Germany and Greece sit squarely in the middle. England was the lowest achieving UEFA squad, earning less than one third of the points tallied by Argentina. The 5 CAF teams all fall at the bottom of the rankings.

All data for this exercise comes from FIFA.

Nick Harris (@sportingintel) parses the data in per match fashion:


1 comment:

  1. Nice. Would be interesting to see the same using Elo rankings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Football_Elo_Ratings) to get an even fairer picture.

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