Why does Fifa use such a broken ranking system?

[Mr Jack]

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?

 

[Mr Jack]

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.

 

[Mr Jack]

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.

 

[Mr Jack]

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.

 

[Mr Jack]

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.

 

[Mr Jack]

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.