World Cup Performance Ranking?

[Mr Hanki's Throne]

Is any statistician on these boards going to produce a performance ranking of World Cup teams based only on the games played in the World Cup? I think it might be interesting to see what the ultimate group strength would be a posteriori. Then it'd be interesting to extend that to the head-to-head eliminators and the full qualification stages. That'd be a performance rating based only on results from a single WC/WCQ sequence.

[voros]

Is any statistician on these boards going to produce a performance ranking of World Cup teams based only on the games played in the World Cup? I think it might be interesting to see what the ultimate group strength would be a posteriori. Then it'd be interesting to extend that to the head-to-head eliminators and the full qualification stages. That'd be a performance rating based only on results from a single WC/WCQ sequence.
I could do it by using a poisson win percentage model for my rankings system. Often, however, you see anomalous rankings due to the small sample. I did this for the U20s a year ago and it was fairly interesting.

[Mr Hanki's Throne]

I could do it by using a poisson win percentage model for my rankings system. Often, however, you see anomalous rankings due to the small sample. I did this for the U20s a year ago and it was fairly interesting.

If I get a couple of extra hours, I might try to relearn Wilson's performance rankings for college football. Small samples are the hallmark of college football performance ratings.

[blacksun]

I think it would be very hard to get any meaningful results because the sample size is so small (each team plays an average of four games) and there are so few connections between groups (no direct connections will exist between many of the 8 groups).
I have a couple of computer rankings I use for football (one based on a paper by some Georgia Tech stats profs and one based on the Colley Matrix) that I may run after the cup is over. I don't expect very good results, though.

[tachyon1]

I agree,the conncections between the groups won't be complete until around the quarter final stage because of the draw.

You could however,included the head to head qualifying games between the finalists.Brazil,Ecuador,Argentina and Paraguay played each other,as did Serbia & M and Spain,Sweden and Croatia,Mexico,US,CR and T & T,to name just a few.And also Togo's 2006 acn meeting with Angola.

That should give you enough games to connect the world cup groups by the time the second group games end on Monday.

You'd have to also allow for things like continental home advantage,home advantage and player dismissals for the games played in Germany.

It'd be an interesting exercise,but limited as a predictive ratings system.

If you routinely keep international ratings you can at least see which teams are improving their ratings in the world cup games.So far I make Ecuador the biggest improver,they've increase their rating by around 0.15 of a goal.

My full list upto and including the Italy US 'game' is

TEAM..........Change in rating since start of WC2006 (In goals)

Ecuador..............0.150
Argentina ............0.147
Spain.................0.096
Ghana................0.060
Australia.............0.057
Angola...............0.051
Trinidad & T........0.045
Switzerland.........0.024
Saudi Arabia........0.021
S Korea..............0.018
Holland...............0.018
Croatia...............0.012
Portugal.............0.009
Germany.............0.000
England..............0.000
Ivory Coast.........-0.006
Italy..................-0.006
Paraguay............-0.009
Mexico...............-0.012
Brazil.................-0.012
Czech Rep..........-0.015
Togo.................-0.018
Tunisia..............-0.021
France..............-0.024
Sweden.............-0.036
USA..................-0.039
Iran..................-0.048
Japan................-0.057
Poland...............-0.075
Costa rica..........-0.075
Ukraine..............-0.096
Serbia & M.........-0.159


Interesting to note that both England and Germany have a 100% record,but haven't improved on their pre tournament rating.

T.

[Mr Hanki's Throne]

I used the code found at the following location:

http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~dwilson/notes.html

And did a performance ranking of World Cup games only, which got me this:

W L T
- - -
1 France 4 0 3 684
2 Switzerland 2 0 2 665
3 Italy 5 0 2 657
4 Brazil 4 1 0 643
5 Spain 3 1 0 633
6 South Korea 1 1 1 627
7 Ghana 2 2 0 603
8 Ukraine 2 2 1 586
9 Czech Republic 1 2 0 567
10 Germany 5 1 1 561
11 Australia 1 2 1 548
12 United States 0 2 1 542
13 Togo 0 3 0 531
14 Croatia 0 1 2 517
15 Portugal 4 2 1 513
England 3 0 2 513
17 Argentina 3 0 2 511
18 Saudi Arabia 0 2 1 489
Tunisia 0 2 1 489
20 Japan 0 2 1 484
21 Sweden 1 1 2 478
22 Netherlands 2 1 1 466
23 Paraguay 1 2 0 432
24 Ecuador 2 2 0 430
25 Mexico 1 2 1 415
26 Trinidad & Tobago 0 2 1 405
27 Angola 0 1 2 383
28 Ivory Coast 1 2 0 378
29 Iran 0 2 1 351
30 Poland 1 2 0 349
31 Serbia & Montenegro 0 3 0 288
32 Costa Rica 0 3 0 262

[numerista]

Ummm ... wow. Does this mean the US just had its best World Cup ever? :D

[tachyon1]

Here's how I rate the sides based solely on 2006 finals games.I've allowed for the European teams having the advantage of playing on their continent,ditto Brazil and Argentina because their players are almost exclusively european based.I've also given Germany a couple of tenths of a goal on top of that to allow for home advantage.

The ratings are therefore in goals and represent the difference between the sides at a truely neutral venue.If you want to visualise how the teams performed with no regard for the natural geographic advantages some teams get at a world cup,then add a couple of tenths to the ratings of the European + Brazil and Argentina sides,slightly more for Germany and subtract a similar amount from the others.

Rank..Team.....Rating in goals.
1.......France.......2.50
2.......Brazil.........2.45
3.......Italy...........2.26
4.......Argentina...2.23
5.......Germany....2.22
6.......Switz.........2.12
7.......England.....1.91
8.......Mexico......1.91
9.......SKorea......1.88
10......Ecuador.....1.87
11......Portugal.....1.86
12......Aussie.......1.73
13......Spain.........1.56
14......Paraguay....1.56
15......Ghana........1.51
16......Holland.......1.45
17......Angola........1.37
18......Sweden.......1.36
19......ICoast.........1.27
20......Croatia........1.23
21......Togo...........1.08
22......CzechR.......1.07
23......Poland.........0.91
24......Iran..............0.81
25......Trinidad.......0.81
26......USA............0.80
27......Japan..........0.78
28......Ukraine.......0.74
29......CRica.........0.46
30......Tunisia........0.13
31......Serbia&M....0.08
32......SArabia........0