Why the FIFA world rankings are not worth the paper they are written on

Football fans don’t see eye-to-eye on many things. But one thing they tend to agree on is that the FIFA world rankings are not worth the paper they’re written on.

The problem, most of us find, is that they’re not written on paper. It’s more fag-packet guesswork impersonating maths and designed at causing the occasional stir with little rhyme nor reason attached to them.

Take this morning’s latest offering from world football HQ, for example.

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Italy have failed to reach the World Cup for the first time since 1958, and the Azzurri are in complete turmoil. Sackings have already taken place, more are set to follow. Their “worst side of all time” is what some of the Italian press have claimed following their play-off loss to Sweden.

Therefore plummeting down the rankings, right? Wrong. They’ve even overtaken England – with easy qualification and brave draws and clean sheets with half a team against Germany and Brazil to their name in the past few months.

Too add to the madness, Italy – despite their public shame – have moved up a place to 14th.

It would be quite comical if it wasn’t actually so serious. The World Cup draw is a week tomorrow, and the all-important pots are decided by FIFA’s speculative hunches of what constitutes a good team.

Rankings are, according to the governing body, calculated over a four-year period.

They are formulated by the ‘importance’ of any games – and of course the result. So, theoretically, if England arranged friendly games over the past few years with world football’s whipping boys, they would have had a better chance of making in into Pot 1 as a top seed.

The current system has allowed some countries to gain an unfair advantage over busier national sides. Wales, for example have played fewer friendlies and had less risk of losing ranking points.

Because of the silly stats and not the clear-to-see ability of nations, Spain are sat in the second tier while Poland take their place with the big boys like Germany, France and Brazil.

They feel the need to muddy the waters even more by giving the host nation a place in Pot 1 – regardless of the fact they’re sitting 65th in the world rankings. Just because.

Iceland would have been forgiven for thinking they should be shooting up the rankings. But no, the story of the past few years in international football circles are in the third pot, while Peru take a second place.

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Nations such as Australia say the system heavily leans towards the traditional footballing powerhouses. “Unfair at best, and deliberately biased at worse” claims Vice Sport.

There’s a groundswell of support for the theory that FIFA should scrap seedings all together and give the smaller nations the chance of progression instead of being lumbered in a group of death.

But with FIFA, as were have come to expect, even getting such fresh ideas to the planning stage seems a bridge too far.