Abstract
I investigate the paradoxes associated with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) point-based ranking of national soccer teams. The ranking has been plagued with paradoxes that incentivize teams to avoid playing friendly matches, i.e., matches that are not part of any official FIFA tournament or preliminaries, and applying other counterintuitive strategies. The most spectacular paradox was the dramatic underrating of the hosts of major tournaments. For a long time, host teams, which were absent from preliminary matches, would play only friendly matches that awarded few points. Here, I present three models that estimate the magnitude of the resulting “host effect” at 14.2–16 positions. Such an estimate counteracts the intuition that a large investment in hosting a tournament should result in an improvement in the host team’s standing. However, as discussed here, a given host’s low ranking could decrease interest in the tournament, and likely result in a major loss of advertisement revenue.
Highlights
I investigate the paradoxes associated with the former Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) ranking
The source of problems was the low weight assigned to friendly matches, or friendlies, i.e., matches that are not part of any official FIFA tournament or preliminaries, versus the preliminaries of both the World Cup and the regional Federation Cups
Poland was criticized before the 2018 World Cup for not playing friendlies until the ranking seeded them in the top pot
Summary
I investigate the paradoxes associated with the former FIFA ranking. Among a variety of its counterintuitive properties was a very poor treatment of tournament hosts. Hosts advance to main tournaments automatically; they do not play in the preliminaries, which typically started about two years before the main event. On. June 2018, just before the first match, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) rated Russian Sbornaya at position 70, the lowest ranked team of all 32 World Cup competitors. The problem was that FIFA’s ranking system seriously undervalued the friendly matches played by the tournaments’ hosts, whereas other teams played in highly valued preliminaries. In the time leading up to the 2018 World Cup, Russia had predictably been sliding in the world rankings (see Figure 1). I conclude with an assessment of the paradox’s consequences
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