rjdgull
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Post by rjdgull on Nov 23, 2011 22:57:36 GMT
I had to rub my eyes when I saw this. England up to fifth above Brazil, Argentina and Italy! That can't have happened often in the last thirty years!  1 Spain 1564 2 Netherlands 1365 3 Germany 1345 4 Uruguay 1309 5 England 1173 6 Brazil 1143 7 Portugal 1100 8 Croatia 1091 9 Italy 1082 10 Argentina 1067 |
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JamesB
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Post by JamesB on Nov 24, 2011 13:23:47 GMT
The problem with the FIFA rankings is that while they are accurate on a continental level, if you put all of them together it doesn't really work. So I wouldn't read much into England being above Brazil and Argentina, even though they have both been pretty poor lately. Italy's ranking is probably accurate because they're going through a very difficult spell, with few quality players coming through and Serie A being a mess
I think you have to look at the breakdown of how it works to see why these things happen too - as well as taking recent results into account, it drops off the results from this month 4 years ago. In England's case, it helps that the matches that have dropped off the score included the infamous 3-2 defeat to Croatia at Wembley. That meant that we picked up only 336 points in November 2007, and 1158 in November 2011 - this is all averaged out for the year and then weighted accordingly, which means England's points go up
Similarly, I'm a bit disappointed that Wales have dropped 5 places despite our only match being a 4-1 win over Norway, the reason being the matches that have dropped off the rankings were draws against Ireland and Germany, which were worth more points together than the 1 win. But I guess it all balances out in the end, and we're still 50th, which is very impressive considering we were outside the top 100 in the summer
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