Ever feel like you’re guessing when betting on tennis, cricket or golf? I make sense of the stats and trends so you can bet confidently and enjoy watching your bets play out.
As the 2026 World Cup approaches, what a lot of people would love to know is who is going to win the competition.
OLBG football tipsters will be adding their thoughts and we would naturally expect a wide cross section of opinions.
It would be nice for football punters if there was a ranking that could be consulted when any two teams play and it could accurately say which was the best side and therefore who would win, or at least reveal the chances of either side winning.
Of course it isn't that simple, there is no such thing as an accurate ranking that can be relied upon in this way.
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But if we do want to look at a ranking to give us a rough guide, we are going to get better results the more accurate this ranking is.
With a ranking system for any football teams there are always going to be numerous problems. The first and biggest problem is that we are looking at information from the past and trying to use that to tell us what will happen in the future.
Football is inherently unpredictable; this is one of the reasons why we watch it, but unfortunately it is also the thing that makes it difficult to make accurate predictions.
With international football this problem exists to a greater extent, because fewer games are played, there is less information from which to draw our conclusions.
We will normally get better results when extrapolating from the past when we have more data, but the fact that international games are played infrequently means that we have to look further into the past, when the teams are less likely to perform in a similar way due to changes in form or personnel.
As well as the smaller quantity of recent information on international football that we have, another problem is the quality.
When two teams play each other, we want to know how they performed when they played against the same or similar opposition in the past.
Given the wide gulf in class between the various teams, this sort of information is not always available.
International qualifying by definition means the teams that eventually make it to the World Cup have to play a lot of games against teams who aren't good enough to make the finals.
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In the last 25 years this problem has been exasperated by the fact that there are now more countries in the world as a result of the breakup of various countries such as the USSR and Yugoslavia.
The varying quality of opposition makes it even more important that in making a ranking system, adjustments are made for games won against weaker opposition.
The problem is that this becomes a “chicken and egg” situation.
We are doing rankings so that we can find out which are the best and worst teams, but in order to do this we need to know which are the best and worst teams.
With any ranking system then, we are always going to have to rely at the start on another, which presumably we don't think is good enough; after all if we did, we wouldn't be creating a new one.
So far this has all been bad news about ranking systems, but there is some good news.
The unpredictability of football might be a problem for punters, but it is also a problem for all the best online bookmakers.
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The fact that it is impossible to create a perfect ranking system is actually a good thing in a way, because if it was possible, the bookies would use it to set their odds and there would be no value bets.
I am a strong believer that by using stats it is possible to gain an edge in football betting and I see a ranking system as a key tool to predicting results in the World Cup.
I think the bookie will also be looking at a ranking system in some form, so the side that wins will be the side that has the more accurate system.
The bookmakers employ statisticians full time to compile their odds, I spend a few hours a week looking at football stats and writing this blog. For me to beat the bookies will be difficult, but I still think it might be fun to give it a go!
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This is the first in a series of blogs on international football rankings, the next blog in the series can be read here.
