@Martin del Palacio wrote the following piece for mediotiempo (http://www.mediotiempo.com/futbol/m...alacio/2014/02/mexico-nunca-ganara-un-mundial) where he claims that Mexico does not and will not have a set of crucial determining factors to win a World Cup. Those two factors are the GDP per capita of a country and the quality of their league. I disagree with his premises and conclusion and since I am a sucker for this kind of analysis, I decided to post a response here. I hope this also turns into a post about Mexico's long term international potential. The first problem is that it makes no sense that a country needs a high GDP/capita to be good enough to win a World Cup and a simple correlation analysis proves this. The best international team rankings is, by far, the ELO ranking. So I decided to see if there was any correlation between the current ELO rankings and the GDP/capita of a country. A perfect positive correlation between two sets of numbers will give you a correlation of 1, which means that when one set of numbers goes up, the second one also goes up. A 0 shows no correlation and a -1 shows a negative correlation. The Elo rankings and the GDP/capita of a country have a correlation of -0.07 which shows absolutely no correlation between the two sets of data. However, there is a positive correlation of 0.46 between ELO ranking and GDP which shows that there is a positive correlation between the GDP of a country and their ELO ranking. Another way to see this is to look at the respective ranking of the top 10 WC favorites to raise the title this summer, which most betting houses agree are the following: Brazil, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, France, Holland, Uruguay and Italy. These 10 teams have an average ranking of GDP/capita ranking of 34.1 versus a 14.5 ranking in GDP. GDP/capita is not a determining factor of World Cup success. Economists Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski give 4 external determining factors of success for national teams and those are (in order): 1) homefield advantage 2) experience 3)population 4) GDP. Notice that this completely goes against @Martin del Palacio 's criteria since he says there is a negative correlation between population and WC success (since the bigger the population, the smaller the GDP per capita, the less chance of success) whereas Kuper and Szymanski find a positive correlation. By experience they mean the amount of games/tournaments a country has played. We will ignore homefield advantage for now since this varies all the time. So the first question is how good should Mexico be right now based on these factors. Since we are looking at WC success, we will define experience as the total amount of world cup games played and we see that Mexico ranks 9th in the world. Mexico ranks 11th in the world in total population and 14 in total GDP. However, if we eliminate teams with very limited national team experience (ie. India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, etc.) it moves Mexico's ranking to 6 and 11 respectively. So it means that the national team should rank in the 8-10 range globally right now. The second question, how does the future look for Mexico? Based on these factors, the future actually looks very good. Assuming Mexico qualifies for every world cup in the next 40 years, the team could move up to about 6th in experience. Based on future projections of population and GDP (by the UN released in 2011) and once again eliminating the countries with no experience, Mexico should rank 3rd in population and 3rd in GDP in about 40 years. Therefore, by 2055, Mexico should have the perfect conditions to be a top 5 country in the world and in the running for a WC title. If you combine this with a WC hosted in Mexico (remember homefield advantage trumps the other 3 factors), we should have a very good chance of lifting a world championship. An important disclaimer. Based on massive amounts of data, these factors show where a country should be, but countries overperform and underperform all the time. To make a comparison to car racing, these factors give you how fast your car is and will be, but if you have a bad pilot that cannot drive, then you will never win the race.
Well hasn't Spain in a financial crisis with record unemployment the last few years? If his premise was correct they wouldn't have won the world cup and 2 consecutive Euros.
Good League and large population is a no brainer, GDP not so much. Brasil has a lower GDP per capita than Mexico depending on the source (IMF, CIA World Factbook, World Bank, etc) and lower a HDI yet they've won it 5 times. Argentina has a higher GDP per capita by about $2,000, though 80% of it is generated in Buenos Aires, a Primate city of around 11 million, while the rest of the population, roughly 3/4 of the country, would have a per capita income of around 4-6 thousand dollars, much much lower than the developed world yet they won it twice. Colombia on the other hand has a much lower population, much lower GDP per capita, much lower HDI, a good domestic league no better or worse than ours, yet they have a much higher chance of winning the WC than us, at least this edition. Definitely we've been underachieving for decades and unfortunately it may continue for some time but I wouldn't say that we'll never win a WC. You can't predict futbol.
Well, right now we are underachieving slightly, but not as much as people think. Based on our performance in the last 5 WCs and other tournaments in between, I would rank us definetly in the top 16 (we have made the top 16 in each of the last 5WCs), and would put us somewhere in the 12-15 range, when at full strength. We should be in the 8-10 range so we are underperforming some. However, I always get a kick of people saying that if we don't get to the 5th game, then the WC is a dissapointment considering the we shouldnt really be a top 8 team in the world. It would be great if we do get to the quarters, but people talk about the 5th game as if we deserve to be there, when we clearly should not. A 5th game for Mexico would be an overachievement, where a 3 and out would be an underachievement. Right now, we are a 4 and out team, which is exactly where we should be. And actually, you could make the argument that we actually overachieved in 94 and 98, since we probably should have been outside the top 16 at that time. A curious note, the most overachieving and underacheiving teams in the world are in Concacaf. The former is Honduras, the latter is Canada. So Honduras performs way above their experience, population and GDP and Canada way bellow their 3 factors.
Pretty much. Hell, Mexico went from winning a gold medal to being almost knocked out of the World Cup in the span of over a year. Mexico still needs more infrastructure when it comes to the sport. Lots of 50,000 to 100,000 people towns and cities lack quality sports facilities in Mexico. The over representation of players from the Mexico City and Guadalajara area on the Mexican national team is finally starting to end and your are seeing players being produced from every corner of Mexico now. That isn't to say that Mexican footballing infrastructure isn't lacking but a large amount of progress has been made in that regard. I will say this within the next ten to twenty years there is a huge possibility that Mexico can make the jump from a competitive team to World Cup contenders.
Well, I do agree with him. Dafuq is up with this 'it's never going to happen shit'. Nothing will change if that's going to be the attitude. Leave that pessimism to Jose Ramon and his band of cangrejos. I know Mexico is not a world power and I don't spazz out if they beat one in a friendly, but just because they've never advanced far in the WC doesn't mean it can't happen this time around. This is sport, nothing is scripted, don't try and take people's hope away, anything can happen.
This is why I love Mexico so much, so much passion, so many different viewpoints, Mexican soccer never gets boring on or off the field
Well this idea falls apart from past WC winners and countries that haven't got one despite having high GDP per capita. Spain dat overachieving minnow, step yo game up Qatar and Norway. Luxembourg, lettuce see dat trophy cabinet. The league quality argument is more sensible but Netherlands did reach the final and not England or Germany which have significantly better leagues(then and now) My take? Anything can happen in cup tournaments(2004 Greece says hello) but having better players and coaches obviously can better your chances. The dumbest thing to do is to try and 'breakdown' something as fickle as a cup tourney where a goal from a minnow team can throw everything on its head. Im gona pretend MDP was forced at gun point by a Salvie to write this so he can keep his cred. Hey we all human.
Even though I would put my money on a country like Costa Rica or Honduras, not winning a World Cup in the next 200 years. They will just never have the population or wealth to even have a shot.
People have been saying this for twenty years....... When it comes to World Cups, which is what the discussion is about. When has Mexico over performed?.
oh I agree. Like I said, better players, leagues, coaches and population that follow and practice the sport will/could make you a real contender but I don't think GDP per capita has much to do with that. And despite the size of those two examples, it wouldn't be incredibly shocking if Uruguay at least reached a finals in the next 20 years.
Yeah just mentioned that. They have a smaller population than Honduras but they faithfully follow and play the sport. It def goes deeper that something like GPD. Even then you can't count out a situation where Hon or us fluke their way to the last four or even past that. It's unlikely but not written in stone. All it takes is a defender day dreaming and a Cheech toe poke(i can dream right?)
I would actually say something similar about Uruguay, even though they have a huge advantage over both Costa Rica and Honduras and that is experience (which is more important than population and GDP). They have only qualified to 2 of the last 5 WC and in one of those they were bounced out in the group stages. They just do not have the popullation to be very consistent. They are not the only darkhorse to have gotten to the semis of the World Cup but taking that last step is always where these underdogs fail. Their best shot is to hopefully have a good team in 2030, since it is rumored that Fifa wants to host the WC in Uruguay.
When has Mexico had Piojo as its coach? And, no, this time I did not type this with a straight face. I know you f'ers are being realistic, but let us dreamers dream.
So the nads are favorites this world cup? Netherlands doesn't have the population either yet have made 3 finals, several semifinals appearances. Too many exceptions to the rule for your hypothesis to stay true.
I wonder tho just how much of the population in Mexico is split between other sports. My dad's family/community outside Tecate in a desert valley ranch don't really(at least then, not been there in a few years) follow the sport or league at all. Baseball and American Football tho is popular. I've seen more Charger/Padres jerseys and posters then jerseys from the Mex league. There's also a dirt baseball field in the community and we had one of those portable basketball hoop things in a shed we'd all play as well as Handball. Hell, dancing in formation to all kinds of music was more popular and imagining some of my cowboy-clad uncles kicking a soccer ball is almost too hard to imagine(k slight exageration) I only came to know and like futbol when we lived in TJ for a few years and remember the city celebrating something about the NT and it was crowded as ******** but I was taken and scared by the passion of the fans. I'll never forget it and the balls being kicked everywhere and old women painting tri colors on peoples faces. Looked like we just won a war lol. Even then tho, baseball and American football were hugely popular there too.
You have shown time and time again, and are confirming it again now, that you have no idea what correlation actually is. This is not a ¨rule¨. A correlation does not mean that one variable must be true in order for something to happen. It just means that looking at massive amounts of data, there is a dependence between two sets of data. For example, there is a correlation between smoking and lung cancer, but that does not mean that everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. Saying that your uncle Pancho smokes 5 packs a day and does not have lung cancer does not mean that there is no correlation. You can have a perfect correlation (1), no correlation at all (0) or somewhere in between, which is what you get between GDP and the top 20 Elo Rankings (0.46). I recomend reading up on correlation and dependence so that you don´t have these misconceptions.