My 2014 World Cup Football Ratings

We are nearly there! The World Cup is just a day away as I write this and the time has come for me to unveil my own International Football Rankings. Having looked at the FIFA ranking as well as the Elo version, I have learned a lot, but the conclusion I have come to is that I am not happy with either. The FIFA rankings are not meant to be used in order to know which football teams to bet on, but I know people who have tried to use them for just that purpose. I don't think that betting blindly on the basis of the ranking will be profitable at the World Cup. My problems with the FIFA ranking have been covered in an earlier blog which can be read here, but briefly they can be summed up as follows:

• I don't think that the score by which a game was won or lost should be ignored, a 3-0 victory is a lot more convincing than a 3-2 victory for example and should be treated as such. Similarly if a team is only beaten 1-0 this is a lot less bad than being beaten 10-0
• I disagree with the ranking system used to rank games by importance, especially worry about using results of friendlies to decide what will happen in in competitive World Cup Games
• I disagree with the weighting system for teams in different confederations, I think that a team's individual ranking should be enough to say how difficult that team is to beat
• Wins on Penalties are given more points than a draw, my rankings system for the purposes of 1X2 betting over 90 minutes, so there is no need to class a penalty shootout win as different from a draw

To combat the second point I will base my ratings only on World Cup and World Cup qualifying games. The strength of the opposition will be taken into account to judge how important a win is, but the confederation that a team belongs to will not. I don't trust friendlies to give me the right information about teams; it is the national federations that pick the opposition for these games, sometimes with a view to increasing the FIFA ranking of the team, in my opinion. This is a reason why teams might appear to over-perform in friendlies, but sometimes they might also under-perform. Managers need to blood new players and friendlies are the ideal opportunity to do this, sometimes this can boost the performance of the team, but more often than not its makes for games with so many substitutions as to tell us nothing about the true quality of either team.

This begs the question, why are the Euros and the Copa América, included. The answer to this is that I would love to include games from these competitions but I don't feel like I can. I want each national side to have roughly the same number of games taken into consideration, and if I include these two competitions I have no choice but to include the African, Asian and Oceania equivalents which I don't hold in the same esteem. I think that games in these competitions are often against a low standard of opposition. By excluding them I think I can avoid the problem that FIFA tries to overcome with the Confederation coefficient. This decision will of course mean that I am taking less games into account overall, but I am confident I will have a high quality of information, and I am going for quality over quantity. Because I am going for quality over quantity, the smaller number of games that I take into account could be seen as a weakness when compared to the FIFA rankings. But the FIFA rankings are used to seed competitions, so they need for any pair of teams to be able to say which is the better and should be seeded the higher in the competition.

So it is the Germans who occupy the number one spot in my rankings. They have reached the semi finals of both of the last two World Cups, which is better than any other team in these two competitions. The Germans also qualified impressively for this tournament winning all but one of their ten games and scoring 36 goals in the process. Second are the hosts Brazil, followed by the Netherlands who are ahead of Spain and Argentina in my ratings, thanks to reaching the finals last time out and having qualified more convincingly than Spain for this competition. The rest of the top ten is made up of Russia, Portugal, Bosnia, Belgium and Chile, although as I will discuss next time out, I do have doubts about the information on which the ratings of both Russia and Bosnia are based.To read the previous part of my series on football ranking systems, click here.