International Football Results 1872-present - www.world-results.net

2005-10-18 - Top 15 versus Top 15

Following last week's blog entry that looked at Germany's record versus the countries in the top 15 of the FIFA ranking, I thought I'd look at all other such countries to see how they performed. Here's the resulting table (sorted by percentage of available points taken) taking into account matches played between the current top 15 countries in the FIFA ranking since 01/01/2000:

    Team                               P     W     D     L    GF    GA  GDIF   PTS      %
1   France                            22    14     4     4    40    19   +21    46   69.7
2   Italy                             21    10     7     4    23    17    +6    37   58.7
3   Netherlands                       30    13    13     4    40    26   +14    52   57.8
4   Brazil                            28    12     8     8    43    32   +11    44   52.4
5   Czech Republic                    20     9     4     7    33    25    +8    31   51.7
6   Spain                             16     7     3     6    20    18    +2    24   50.0
7   Portugal                          24     9     8     7    35    35     0    35   48.6
8   Argentina                         20     7     7     6    24    25    -1    28   46.7
9   Sweden                            22     5    14     3    26    24    +2    29   43.9
10  England                           30     8    11    11    38    33    +5    35   38.9
11  United States                     23     8     2    13    24    25    -1    26   37.7
12  Denmark                           23     6     7    10    22    33   -11    25   36.2
13  Mexico                            29     7     7    15    18    42   -24    28   32.2
14  Germany                           26     6     5    15    34    50   -16    23   29.5
15  Turkey                            20     2     8    10    16    32   -16    14   23.3

You can also view all the matches.

Given the current FIFA rankings it's no surprise to see the Netherlands or Brazil so high up this table, or to see England and Germany so far down given their recent form, but I was surprised to see Italy so high given they are 13th in the latest FIFA rankings. Of course, some of their more dubious performances have come against teams that were ranked lower than them.

Although not totally representative as all countries haven't played each other the same number of times, it is nonetheless rather interesting. Even though France tops the table by quite some way in percentage terms, the Netherlands have lost the lowest percentage of matches, and would it not be for the incredible 13 draws, they'd head the table if they had managed 6 wins from those 13 draws. Similarly, Sweden's record would be equally impressive had they not played so many draws. Will it be these teams that have the best records against the top 15 in the past five years be the countries that end up challenging for the World Cup in 8 months time? Time can only tell.

2005-10-21 - Additional comments

Posted by svsvsv

Very interesting study indeed ; but I found it rather unfair to give the same weight to all those games.

So I went to the eloratings.net website (which you are right to advertize frequently because it's excellent), and I counted the elopoints earned and lost during the games of that list.

I give below you the result for the 15 countries : the ranking is rather different, and think more representative of the intrinsic performance of each country :

1. Brazil + 4.11 elopoints/game (+115 elopoints / 28 games)
2. Sweden + 3.14 (+69/22)
3. Czechia + 2.75 (+55/20)
4. Portugal + 2.29 (+55/24)
5. France + 1.83 (+40/22)
6. Italy + 1.43 (+30/21)
7. England + 1.30 (+39/30)
8. Netherlands + 1.03 (+31/30)
9. Mexico - 0.76 (-22/39)
10. Denmark - 0.96 (-22/23)
11. Spain - 2.19 (-35/16)
12. United States - 2.83 (-65/23)
13. Turkey - 3.60 (-72/20)
14. Argentina - 5.60 (-112/20)
15. Germany - 6.15 (-160/26)

Sweden being 2nd and Argentina being 14th is rather surprising ; but this ranking gives back the 1st spot to whom it belongs ; France and Netherlands are back to reasonable ranks according to their real performance ...

and of course, the 15th was known before any addition being made ;-)

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2005-10-24 - Untitled Comment

Posted by Petrograd

Well, this shows Sweden's draws at least increase their Elo-points :P
To be fair, we've had two losses to Croatia, ranked 19th according to fifa and 13th according to eloratings.

It's interesting numbers, but thinking about what they'd mean in a tournament, I'm not too worried about draws for the group play, as long as the team wins 1-2 games, a draw against the group winner usually isn't a problem. However, it's a problem when it comes to the end thing, being Swede, we lost in European Cup after penalties and in World Cup after a golden goal (both times after doing very well in the groups) last times.

But remembering the talk about how certain teams (like Argentina) would let their opponents win in the last rounds of the South American WC qualifications, as long as it didn't matter to them but did to their opponents, it's good to understand the effect of that on your elo-ratings... When teams does that they temporarely lower their own rating against a team that wont be taken into consideration here (too low rated), which means their opponents get too little points for drawing/beating them, but lose more than they should when defeating them. Dunno if that's how they play, but that's the effect it'd have.

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