I do not think that the rankings are accurate or fair. I think that big countries (that aren’t necessarily big in football) are being treated too well by FIFA while smaller countries get disadvantages. Mexico for example was always given very high rankings after winning the Gold Cup (which is not that hard to do). Another example is Iraq which spent the last few months just going though changes and not playing is still ranked higher than Bosnia and Herzegovina that had some great results during and before that period . Is there an official way for FIFA to determine the ranking of each country?
Accurate? No. Fair? It's not a question of fair. It's a point system. Teams get ranked based on their results in recent years. It's not like its some guy sitting behind a desk typing up who he thinks is #1, #2, etc.
The main flaw with the rankings is that they are based on an 8 year period with a 12.5% taper. This is much longer than any other sports ranking system I know of. It makes them very insensitive to changes in form. I think a four year system would be much fairer to the smaller countries.
Even though most of them was our future team and were lucky to have 20 caps between them? When it counted we lost 1 game and we dropped 40 places, they are an utter joke.
Fifa also had something of an agenda, as they wanted to say that every nation represented at the world cup was in the top 40 or 50 ranked nations in the world, and with the increased asian representation there was quite a shuffling of the rankings going on before hand. Saudi arabia takes an 8-nil hammering off germany and they are supposed to be one of the top 50 footballing countries in the world?
Scotland didn't "repeatedly" lose friendlies by those scorelines. There was one 5-0 defeat at the hands of France. The next biggest friendly defeat in recent years was a 4-1 defeat against South Korea. All matches considered (friendlies and competitive games), in the last 8 years Scotland have only conceded more than 2 goals on 5 occasions, in the space of 82 matches. Those occasions: Scotland 0-3 Morocco (1998 World Cup) Czech Republic 3-2 Scotland (Euro 2000 Qualifier) France 5-0 Scotland (Friendly) South Korea 4-1 Scotland (Friendly) Netherlands 6-0 Scotland (Euro 2004 Play-off)
I've checked the graph on FIFA.com. It took two years for Scotland to drop 40 places, despite form that had Scottish callers on the phone-ins spitting blood.
That should be your answer. A bunch of the folks ahead of you haven't lost by those kinds of scorelines in a long time. Also, the neighborhood in which Scotland hangs out is crowded, so a relatively small drop in the absolute score can result in a big swing in the rankings. Essentially, there are scads of comparably good teams, so small variations in results can send you shooting past large numbers of teams. I wouldn't give it too much thought since those variations are easily within the noise. G.