SFA's rank stupidity will cost us

Gareth Bale and Wales are going places...but should they be going into pot one?

I think even the most loyal Welshman would agree that there's something fundamentally wrong with the FIFA World Rankings.  The Welsh entered the top ten for the first time this week; that puts them just ahead of a Chile, who just won the Copa America, and Spain.  Neither Italy nor France are quite the force they used to be, but ranking them 17th and 22nd respectively seems a bit drastic.  Scotland, meanwhile, are 29th.

These ridiculous rankings are used to decide seedings for the upcoming 2018 World Cup Qualifiers - the draw for which takes place in a St. Petersburg palace (it's FIFA - of course it would be decadent) in a fortnight.

Wales go in the top pot.  Scotland go in the third pot.  It's an outrage, an injustice, a scandal.

Except it isn't really, because the FIFA rankings were used to seed the 2014 World Cup qualifiers as well, and the format used to calculate the rankings hasn't changed for many years.  To cut a long and boring story short, this format gives you points depending on your result and the ranking of your opponent, with competitive games worth three times as much as friendlies.  Defeats are worth zero, regardless of opponent and context.  The points gained in each game are averaged out over a calendar year, and results from previous years are less valuable than recent ones.

With that knowledge available, any football association with half a brain would play the system.

Scotland's dream group

Romania

Iceland

Scotland

Faroe Islands

Moldova

Andorra

For a start, don't play friendlies.  Really, for the love of god, don't play friendlies.  And not just because they rival the World Paint Drying Championships for excitement.  Unless you're playing someone as good as, or better than, you - and beating them - it's almost certainly detrimental.  Playing Qatar last month was wrong for lots and lots of non-football related reasons, but it also cost us a small (almost negligible, to be fair), number of ranking points even though we won, for Qatar were ranked 109th at the time.  

That win against Qatar did more harm than good

The win against Northern Ireland in the Spring was marginally beneficial, but if we hadn't won either of those friendlies then it would have been a disaster.  The defeat to England in November, meanwhile, was a big fat zero which cost us heavily.  In fact, if we hadn't played that game at all, we'd have been in pot two.

A clever Football Association wouldn't arrange friendlies at all.  Romania, for example, have actively avoided them over the last four years...and they're ranked 8th and in pot one, despite not qualifying for the last four major tournaments.  I don't know if Wales deliberately set out a similar policy, but they haven't played one in the last year.  That move, along with a home win over a Belgium side who at the time were crazily ranked second on the world, has blasted them up the table at the critical moment.

Scotland's nightmare group

Germany

Italy

Scotland

Turkey

Finland

Kazakhstan

(format: winners qualify; best eight out of nine second placed teams advance to playoffs)

If Gordon Strachan insists on friendly matches, either to give the players some gametime or simply to try to convince us that, by putting him on the pitch against woeful opposition, Matt Ritchie is actually half-decent, then for goodness sakes stop them getting acknowledged by FIFA - either bring on too many subs, or play them against club sides, or play them against Gibraltar (games against them don't count yet).

But instead of railing against a system that's treated us relatively fairly (putting us in pot two would be generous), maybe the SFA and the national coach should have tried playing, and beating, the system instead?  If they had, we might have had a hell of a better chance of being at a World Cup for the first time in twenty years.


Lawrie Spence (LS) has ranted and spouted his ill-informed opinions on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007.  He has a life outside this blog.  Honestly.