An Algorithm for the true value of your team.
June 25, 2010.
I was bummed earlier this month. With the World Cup approaching, I didn't have any rankings.
It was too hard; teams play all kinds of different games, from World Cup matches to international friendlies.
The line up for a team can vary greatly from game to game.
But then I had an idea: just use the qualifying games for the World Cup.
Every nation in the world cares about making the World Cup, so the best players play in these qualifying games.
It's not perfect, but it's much better than sorting through all the friendlies played over the last two years and throwing out each one in which both teams didn't play their best guys.
A full explanation is below.
In the first installment of the Power Rank for international soccer, South America rules the world. This shouldn't be too surprising as all five South American teams advanced past the group stage at the World Cup with only one loss between them. With all the hype about European heavyweights Spain and the Netherlands before the tournament, it was easy to forget that a South American team has won every single World Cup played outside of Europe. The US comes in at 14th, a fair place for these cardiac kids. The Power Rank suggests a slight edge over Ghana in tomorrow's game.
To calculate these rankings, we consider all teams that made the "final stage" of World Cup qualifying. In Europe and South America, this includes all teams, while in North American, the final stage only hosts a final six teams. Wikipedia has a full list of these teams. We choose to not include matches from earlier stages as countries may not play their best players in pummeling the minnows in their region, e.g. the United States over Barbados. As inputs to the Power Rank algorithm, we use matches from the last stage of qualifying, last year's Confederations Cup and the World Cup. We included two additional teams that do not appear on the Wikipedia list. As Asian Cup champions, Iraq played in the Confederations Cup but somehow didn't make it to the last stage of qualifying in Asia. Finally, South Africa is included in the rankings as the host nation for both the Confederations Cup and World Cup; they did not have to qualify for either competition. A full list of all teams is here.