Egypt ranks 9th (4 Viewers)
- Thread starter Yamen
- Start date
Gabon did very well in the qualifiers, they beat some big teams on the way too. They almost qualified for the WC. They beat Ghana in the first round of the qualifiers 3-2. IIRC they beat Cameroon too later on.
The FIFA rankings are however rubbish, but the FIFA can't do much about it, they wanted to make an objective system based on results to rank teams, but these kind of things never work in football.
That's understandable. The main site for those ratings, eloratings.net, is up and down like your mom's underwear, so I'll explain here.
Imagine you have a standard team. Let's call them Norway for the sake of it. If, say, Ireland were to play Norway a hundred times, I'd die of boredom. Also, I'd expect Ireland to maybe score 52% (counting a draw as a half a win). If Spain played Norway 100 times, they might score about 85%. The Elo system reckons that that means Spain would beat Ireland a heck of a lot of the time too, and quantifies that.
Of course, no one plays any one team all that often, so the scheme basically updates the rating of each team after each match with the result: if Ireland loses to Spain, Ireland's rating goes down a little bit ans Spain's goes up a little. If the opposite result happens, bigger changes happen. If Ireland beats Norway, we go up by a moderate amount - smaller than for beating Spain, but bigger than Spain would get for the same result. So, over time, everyone's rating tends to wobble near their true strength.
The wiki link I gave has the current table for the top 60 teams in the world.
The only weakness in the whole thing is that it assumes a normal distribution to results by rating difference, which is only approximately true. It's a far better ranking than anything FIFA's ever come up with.
Imagine you have a standard team. Let's call them Norway for the sake of it. If, say, Ireland were to play Norway a hundred times, I'd die of boredom. Also, I'd expect Ireland to maybe score 52% (counting a draw as a half a win). If Spain played Norway 100 times, they might score about 85%. The Elo system reckons that that means Spain would beat Ireland a heck of a lot of the time too, and quantifies that.
Of course, no one plays any one team all that often, so the scheme basically updates the rating of each team after each match with the result: if Ireland loses to Spain, Ireland's rating goes down a little bit ans Spain's goes up a little. If the opposite result happens, bigger changes happen. If Ireland beats Norway, we go up by a moderate amount - smaller than for beating Spain, but bigger than Spain would get for the same result. So, over time, everyone's rating tends to wobble near their true strength.
The wiki link I gave has the current table for the top 60 teams in the world.
The only weakness in the whole thing is that it assumes a normal distribution to results by rating difference, which is only approximately true. It's a far better ranking than anything FIFA's ever come up with.
Yeah. You've assumed that Egypt's failure to qualify completely encapsulates the quality of the team. If your reasoning tracked, the world rankings would basically be how far each team progressed in the last WC.
If Chile's performance wasn't so much lucky as a good team gelling, they'll rise in the rankings.
If Chile's performance wasn't so much lucky as a good team gelling, they'll rise in the rankings.