UEFA has 14 spots for the 2018 World Cup. Here are the major European countries with their economic determinant (a number that estimates countries potential based on gdp per capita and population amount). See this video for more commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FNh8DIltP0 Germany: 32.4 million France: 26.5 million Italy: 21.3 million England: 20.1 million Russia: 15.2 million Spain: 14.5 million Netherlands: 8.4 million Turkey: 7.3 million Switzerland: 5.8 million Sweden: 4.9 million Belgium: 4.9 million Poland: 4.8 million Norway: 4.3 million Austria: 3.9 million Denmark: 3.2 million Greece: 3 million Finland: 2.5 million Portugal: 2.3 million Israel: 2.3 million Ireland: 2.2 million Czechia: 2.1 million Scotland: 2 million Romania: 1.7 million Kazakhstan: 1.5 million Ukraine: 1.4 million Hungary: 1.3 million Wales: 1.2 million Slovakia: 892,000 Northern Ireland: 689,000 Croatia: 597,000 Belarus: 552,000 Azerbaijan: 529,000 Luxembourg: 524,000 Bulgaria: 499,000 Slovenia: 480,000 Serbia: 395,000 Lithuania: 371,000 Cyprus: 336,000 Latvia: 237,000 Estonia: 195,000 Bosnia Herzegovina: 172,000 Iceland: 132,000 Georgia: 132,000 Albania: 117,000 Conclusion: Though competition is extremely heavy in Europe, the largest group of European countries still should have a relatively easy time qualifying even if playing somewhat below par. The next group of countries is in a much more difficult situation as the 3rd group is close to them in economic size, and the 4th group is full of over achievers. Difficulty for the 3rd and 4th groups are extremely high... slightly harder than in Asia even if skill differences between continents are ignored. The only country belolw these groups that may qualify is Montenegro of the former Yugoslavia. How far they have gone is nothing short of amazing.
You listed 44 countries, so you left out 11. Croatia is 30th on the list but much better than 30th on the field. Maybe later I'll calculate the correlation between those values and the FIFA Rankings and/or ELO Ratings.
You're telling me what I already told yo I left out countries that have below 100,000 economic determinant (unless I missed a few). Yes, Croatia (and other former Yugoslav countries) seem to overachieve in many sports. Here are estimated true rankings of Croatia in several sports (though some of the sports are incomplete because I haven't had time to enter all data): http://internationalsports.nfshost.com/index.php/home/profile/12 (note: these include present and historic stats, so Ustashe flag is displayed... don't click if you are offended by historic flags) I have done this for 2010 and 2014 already, not sure if you had the same thing in mind (this uses an old method before Economic Determinant called Available Population to represent wealth and population ): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16izHFOKdbiSzRqj-ykeVQaqNJZ1SY8uPYHo2TFO5vcM
That's a good spreadsheet. For 2014 the correlation between FIFA Ranking points and your variable was 0.3840. That's not that strong a correlation, but I don't know if other methods would produce a stronger correlation.
Keep in mind that sheet only accounts for 1 sport in 1 year... this is not much data to work with at all. I was surprised that the correlation for wealth and population was so strong for individual sports when I originally compiled a few individual sports back in 2012 (I wrongly predicted to myself that it would only be obviously noticeable when you combine the results of many sports). It also doesn't take into consideration countries where football is a 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even a 5th favorite sport, which is even more amazing why there is a noticeable correlation. I have also made a spreadsheet compiling 20 different sports, olympic medals since 2010, and Greatest Sports Nation results. Perhaps these will give you a bigger number if you wish to experiment... the reason I think they will (at least some of them) is because of the law of large numbers, we are dealing with more relative data. https://docs.zoho.com/writer/open/1vl7ie0117b6d4cb74977aeed9870336f002e (scroll down) take your pick on which spreadsheets you want to examine. the one where you should receive the least correlation is Australian Rules football.. because it is played mostly in an area where there are very small countries. As we can probably assume, interest in a sport is the biggest factor... though can often be negated by wealth and population amount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence is about correlation. Correlation ranges from -1 to 1. If all the data points are on a line with a positive slope, the correlation would be 1. For example (1, 4), (2, 5), and (3, 6) have a correlation of 1 because y = x + 3 goes through all the points. If all the data points are on a line with a negative slope, the correlation would be -1. (1, 6), (2, 5), and (3, 4) has a correlation of -1 because y = -x - 7 goes through all the points. In reality, correlations are rarely going to equal 1 or -1. The correlation between points and goal differential in soccer can be strong. For example, that correlation for the teams in CONMEBOL World Cup Qualifying with 1 game left is .9504. If you calculate the correlation between points and goals scored, it will be positive, but not as strong as between points and goal differential. The correlation between points and goals scored for CONMEBOL is .7609.
Thanks, do you have a spreadsheet setup for this you could share, and have you viewed any of the other spreadsheets? The multiple sports spreadsheet would probably be best to use because there is more data to work with.
I copied and pasted your spreadsheet into a spreadsheet on my computer so I could edit it and do calculations. I might work on it more, but not today.
I hope that you do, we need more people talking about this. You might find this interesting as well (this link is not my website): https://public.tableau.com/profile/cubicfooty#!/vizhome/Footynomics/Dashboard1
How does https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...eVQaqNJZ1SY8uPYHo2TFO5vcM/edit#gid=1446180174 define "available population"? For Brazil the available population is 30.5% of Brazil's population according to Wikipedia. For Germany the available population is 64.9% of Germany's population according to Wikipedia. You used the July 2014 FIFA Rankings, but you have Liberia with 115 points and they were 115th with 256 points. This changes the average available population for 126-150 from 1.3 to 1.4 and for 151-207 from 1.3 to 1.1. The linear regression equation is FIFA Ranking Points = 6.832*available population + 346.212
Available population is amount of people living on the equivalent of 10USD or more. It is what I used to use to get an estimation of combined wealth and population. It works pretty well, but is hard to get data for, so I moved to something else. A higher percentage of Germany's population would be considered "available" because they have more wealth and are more likely to contribute to the sport directly or indirectly. I'll have to update the spreadsheet to fix the error when I can, thanks!