Why does Fifa use such a broken ranking system?

Mr Jack · 29 Nov 2013 at 11:15

I've just been reading this BBC news article on why the Swiss are ranked but England and Italy aren't. It boils down to this: the Fifa ranking system is dumber than a bag of delinquent blonds. The system is so broken that playing, and beating, opposition in a friendly can actually lower your ranking.

This is madness, and if the advice of the article starts being taken by top teams then it will have a chilling effect on the international friendly.

So why is Fifa using such an obviously flawed mess of a ranking system?

RTXIII · 29 Nov 2013 at 11:17

As FIFA are a bunch of useless cretins.

drunkenmaster · 29 Nov 2013 at 11:37

Why exactly? What in the article is outrageous exactly and what chilling effect could it have on international friendlies.

If a team plays Indonesia 12 times in a year and beats them 55-0 every time, should they be considered the best team in the world? Fifa don't think so, good on them.

If a team plays tougher teams and beats them, it's worth more points. if you waste your time completely playing one of the worst teams in the world, even if you beat them, it's worthless. That is fine. England could have been a top seed, if we played more top teams, great, except we'd lose more games.

Holland could have played Germany instead of Indonesia, and been thrashed, thereby getting few points anyway.

Holland now might have to face say Brazil in the group stages.... good, incredibly bored of group stages where 2 teams are utterly utterly awful, and 2 teams will cruise through no matter how bad they are(England). To win the world cup, you have to beat every team put in front of you, if Holland actually have to beat one more top team, GOOD, that is one more good game for us to watch rather than another waste of a time game.

Seedings have, and always will be a joke, completely random groups would be much more fun in general, much less predictable and much fairer.

Rankings and seeds are mostly pointless.

div0 · 29 Nov 2013 at 11:48

Mr Jack said:
The system is so broken that playing, and beating, opposition in a friendly can actually lower your ranking.

I don't believe that this is true. It looks to me like the BBC article explains this very poorly.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the FIFA rankings are based on a total points score (calculated over 4 years). It has nothing to do with points per game.

So beating San Marino in a friendly does not lose you points, or lower your ranking. It just doesn't gain you very many points.

The rankings are no where near as bad as some people (or that article) make out. England/Italy/Holland chose to play (and beat) terrible teams, but teams like Switzerland chose to play (and beat) harder teams.

This meant Switzerland earned more points.

In the last 12 months, England have lost to Sweden (ranked 27th), drawn with the Republic of Ireland (67th) and beaten Scotland (33rd), but even the win against Scotland brought their average points total down.

Again, this is totally missing the point. England gained points for beating Scotland, that's all that matters. Talking about average points per game is trying to gloss over the facts. If England wanted to be able to gain more points, they should have played against a 'better' team. Of course, then they might have lost, which could have earned them no points - and then they'd been even lower ranked!

Suggesting that rankings are based purely on competitive matches, may seem to yield a better 'top ten' just now. But you massively reduce the sample size for the data - which means that it's a lot easier to get one or two 'fluke' results skewing the list.

There is no perfect system, but all the teams should know how the current system works. If you want to be in the top ten, you need to be earning lots of points - so don't waste time organising friendlies against hopeless teams like San Marino.

Martynt74 · 29 Nov 2013 at 12:40

div0, the article seems to suggest an Average approach is used. So getting bugger all points for beating the rubbish teams would lower the teams average score.

After reading it i actually think its a decent enough system.

div0 · 29 Nov 2013 at 12:46

Marvt74 said:
div0, the article seems to suggest an Average approach is used. So getting bugger all points for beating the rubbish teams would lower the teams average score.

It does indeed seem to imply that - but I don't believe it's correct.

I think the point they're trying to make is that to compete for a place in the top ten, you need to continually gain as many points as your rivals. So if you gain less than an 'average' number of points (for a team in the top 10), then you will effectively drop down the rankings.

But that is obvious! If other teams are playing harder games and winning - then you need to keep doing the same!

jas72 · 29 Nov 2013 at 12:55

Brazil will win next year away no matter what the seeds.

You can stick your pound of Cumberland sausages on that.

drunkenmaster · 29 Nov 2013 at 14:09

jas72 said:
Brazil will win next year away no matter what the seeds.

You can stick your pound of Cumberland sausages on that.

It's very possible, it's between the home nation + Spain + germany currently. Holland got to the final and Spain were relatively poor and still looked 50 times more likely to win the game than Holland who tried to murder their way through it.

home nations advantage is freaking monumental but only goes so far. Qatar aren't going to win it(though they could, if the Qatar police force murders all the other teams, or no other teams turn up

).

Brazil are hugely over rated in general though, have been for years, they were excellent for many years but the past 6-8 years they aren't the same strength. They have very few top notch players, a lot of average players and not a particularly strong system/approach. They will have phenomenal, intimidating, opposition soul crushing support that the other top teams won't have.

Mr Jack · 29 Nov 2013 at 15:22

Marvt74 said:
After reading it i actually think its a decent enough system.

In what sense is it reasonable that beating a lower team lowers your ranking? That's not the behaviour of a sensible system. You shouldn't be able to lower your ranking by winning.

It's not like this is difficult to achieve, this simple set up will do it:

1. Give 0 for a loss, 4 for a draw, 10 for a win
2. Take the same scoring system used but instead of calculating a score, use the scores as weights.
3. Weight each game by its Fifa-style score.
4. Weight games according to their time slot in some manner.
5. Bosh. Done. Every team gets a score between 0 and 10 that can be used to rank them.

You might need to cap the scores if the team has not played any high quality opposition in recent times depending on how much that happens.

Jokester · 29 Nov 2013 at 15:25

Mr Jack said:
In what sense is it reasonable that beating a lower team lowers your ranking? That's not the behaviour of a sensible system. You shouldn't be able to lower your ranking by winning.

It's an assumption in the article that it lowers your rating - if all you did was play dross then it wouldn't impact your rating because your average was already low. It's entirely sensible that playing teams much lower in the rankings don't net you as much points as playing top teams.

Mr Jack · 29 Nov 2013 at 15:25

div0 said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the FIFA rankings are based on a total points score (calculated over 4 years). It has nothing to do with points per game.

The BBC articles says this "Fifa is trying to compare all the national teams and some play many more games than others so to make it fair, the rankings are based on the average number of points earned in each game." - assuming they've got their facts straight that's pretty clear.

div0 · 29 Nov 2013 at 15:30

Mr Jack said:
In what sense is it reasonable that beating a lower team lowers your ranking?

/edit - just seen you above post.

I still don't think the system is necessarily bad. Just that some teams stupidly chose to play games from which they were never going to benefit.

semi-pro waster · 29 Nov 2013 at 19:27

div0 said:
/edit - just seen you above post.

I still don't think the system is necessarily bad. Just that some teams stupidly chose to play games from which they were never going to benefit.

Why not have it so that friendly matches don't count towards your ranking score then? If a team wants to practice by playing a dozen "meaningless" friendlies then why should that disadvantage them in the rankings by lowering their average points per game? Is it really better to play only your qualifying games for the World Cup or (possibly) some of the top teams if you think you're likely to beat them?

Mr Jack · 29 Nov 2013 at 19:32

div0 said:
I still don't think the system is necessarily bad. Just that some teams stupidly chose to play games from which they were never going to benefit.

And this is exactly what I describe as the 'chilling effect'. International friendlies shouldn't be organised on the basis of gaming the rankings. There's nothing stupid about playing a friendly against Fiji; what's stupid is punishing teams for it.

drunkenmaster · 29 Nov 2013 at 21:58

Mr Jack said:
In what sense is it reasonable that beating a lower team lowers your ranking? That's not the behaviour of a sensible system. You shouldn't be able to lower your ranking by winning.

It's not like this is difficult to achieve, this simple set up will do it:

1. Give 0 for a loss, 4 for a draw, 10 for a win
2. Take the same scoring system used but instead of calculating a score, use the scores as weights.
3. Weight each game by its Fifa-style score.
4. Weight games according to their time slot in some manner.
5. Bosh. Done. Every team gets a score between 0 and 10 that can be used to rank them.

You might need to cap the scores if the team has not played any high quality opposition in recent times depending on how much that happens.

It can lower your ranking because lets say you're 10th, and you play Mongolia and thrash them 47 nil, but because they are so crap the points weighting system means you only get 150 points. That's fine but the team in 11th place were 300 points behind, and they went and beat, I dunno, Holland, and got 800 points.

England win, but drop to 11th, because the team in 11th won, and won against a much much better team.

The rankings and points you gain ARE weighted, it's why a win against a no one is worth 150 points and a win against a good team is worth a lot more. You don't get minus 150 points for beating someone crap, you are just gaining less points than the other teams also winning who are winning against better teams.

England for instance, as did Holland, CHOSE to play someone crap, rather than playing better teams, and other teams CHOSE to play harder teams, they got more points for making the choice to play better teams. Why should teams beating better teams not be considered better.

The article directly stats the formula, and it's basically exactly what you are asking for. 3 points for a win, 1 a draw, 0 a loss. Then you have this

M: Result of the match - win (3), draw (1) defeat (0)
I: Importance of the match - friendly (1), World Cup qualifier or confederation-level qualifier (2.5), Confederation level or Confederations Cup match (3) and FIFA World Cup match (4)
T: Strength of opposition - No 1 ranked team (200) down on sliding scale to 150th ranked team (50) and all teams below also 50
C: Strength of confederation of opposition - Europe/South America (1), North and Central America, Caribbean (0.88), Asia/Africa (0.86) and Oceania (0.85)

points = M x I x T x C.

If you beat the rank 1 team in the world, from the rank 1 federation, in the most important match in the world(world cup games) you get the most points. if you play a friendly, against 150th ranked or less, against an asian/african/oceania team, you get smeg all.

England CHOSE to play a team that would fair badly in the rankings, weighting, and did this repeatedly. Other teams picked tougher teams.

The consequence of this rankings system is, if you balls up loads of group games, and lose to most of the better teams you play, you won't rank or seed well......... what part of that sounds wrong precisely? Are we saying that if England draw loads of group games, lose against the better teams in friendlies and can only beat crap teams in friendlies..... that we should automatically rank and seed somewhere in the top 10? The system as is, is MUCH fairer than people say.

The Swiss ranked highly because in the past year in particularly, they've played well and had good results, exactly how is that unfair if other teams didn't play this well?

Mr Jack · 29 Nov 2013 at 22:13

drunkenmaster said:
The article directly stats the formula, and it's basically exactly what you are asking for. 3 points for a win, 1 a draw, 0 a loss.

No, that's not what I suggested. I suggested a weighted average, because the Fifa system uses an average of weighted scores it has stupid properties.

The Swiss ranked highly because in the past year in particularly, they've played well and had good results, exactly how is that unfair if other teams didn't play this well?

It's not really a question of the Swiss being higher ranked; it's the idea that beating the wrong team lowers your average. That in order to get a seed you need to not play lower ranked teams. If the Swiss had chosen to play three extra friendlies - say against Eritrea, the Seychelles and Macau - and won all three, it would actually have lowered their ranking. That's insane.

drunkenmaster · 29 Nov 2013 at 22:33

No it's not insane, otherwise England, and Italy, and all the best teams in the world would ONLY play the worst teams in the world and would automatically be the highest seeds for every competition. The entire idea is that it encourages top teams to play each other. England vs Italy both gets more viewers, more advertising money, can charge more for a ticket and generates massively more income than England vs, Indonesia, or Samoa, or whoever else. So it's better for both teams financially. Physically, mentally, tactically, playing a top teams means more to the teams in terms of world cup preparation. Imagine going into the world cup only having played against teams ranked below 130 in the world then playing Brazil in the first game....

In many or most systems there has to be a measure in which to punish teams and prevent them manipulating the system.

How would you feel if England played the top 8 teams in the world in friendlies, lost 4, drew 3, won 3, then coming outside the top seeds when Scotland get in the top 10 because they played and beat 10 teams in friendlies but they were all ranked 130 or below?

According to you, without being punished for playing crap teams, that would be totally fair.

But then, EVERY top team would ONLY play crap teams, would win them with ease, they would be woeful to watch, generate no money, fans wouldn't attend, and when it came to the world cup the level of quality on show would be horrendous as none of the top teams would be anywhere near where they are now quality wise if they had for the previous 4 years turned up, done nothing and won 24-0.

No, playing woeful teams SHOULD absolutely, unquestionably hurt your position because otherwise all internationals would become truly horrendously awful to watch, the world cup and to a lesser degree the euro's(because there are less bad teams in Europe, frankly the top 8 teams couldn't play 8 different truly awful teams on the same day) would be completely pointless affairs.

Mr Jack · 29 Nov 2013 at 22:58

drunkenmaster said:
According to you, without being punished for playing crap teams, that would be totally fair.

Except I have said anything of the sort. In fact I specifically suggested that you might need a system to prevent possible abuse but, of course, a sensibly weighted system would be far less open to abuse than the current rubbish.

No, playing woeful teams SHOULD absolutely, unquestionably hurt your position because otherwise all internationals would become truly horrendously awful to watch, the world cup and to a lesser degree the euro's(because there are less bad teams in Europe, frankly the top 8 teams couldn't play 8 different truly awful teams on the same day) would be completely pointless affairs.

What on earth are you talking about? Teams will always play other good teams in competition by definition. Outside of competition teams will always choose to play other good teams because the games are more highly valued and better experience for the players.

What I would like is for the ranking system not to be a factor in the decision making of who to play. Countries shouldn't be expected to game the system in order to land good seeds. The current system manifestly fails to do that. A sensible system would assess the relative rankings of teams without penalising them for playing weaker teams.

Are you honestly saying that if Team A beats top Teams 1 through 4 and then beats tiddler Teams 150 and 152 they should be ranked less highly than Team B who just plays Teams 1 through 4? Because that's what the current stupid system means. In fact, playing friendlies at all can lower your ranking. This is stupid.