USA men have been hovering at 10 for many weeks now. I'm a huge USA soccer fan, but does this seem a little high for USA? Okay, we kicked some "A" in World Cup, but how the hell does Fifa do it's rankings? What's a real world ranking for USA?
For an in depth explanation of the rankings go to fifa.com. To net it, it's a computerized ranking pro rating the last eight years. It takes into effect opponent's ranking, score, location, and type of match (WC, WCQ, friendly, etc.).
Maybe top ten is a bit inflated for USMNT. But they are certainly in the top 20. Which still is pretty damn good for a country that is supposedly not a soccer power. Of course our neighbors "El Tri" are number nine and we have won the last six of seven against them including a recent critical World Cup match. So perhaps the FIFA rankings take into account too much history. I don't think the current France or Argentina lineups deserve their high rankings. But historically speaking, it seems the FIFA rankings are quite fair. Just not very reflective of current standings.
US totally a top ten team The US deserves to be in the top ten. If the world cup was not a strong enough reason for the ranking, there are others: We currently have a handful of players in the EPL and first division getting strong reviews. MLS squads (who have players on the US Roster) barely in pre-season are beating club teams from around the world. Fire away.
After Argentina, Brasil, Italy and Germany all the other top countries are relatively inconsistent. They are certainly good, as France has been since 97/98, but not always in the top five or even ten. So a good run of a couple of years can project any of a dozen or more countries into places immediately behind the big five. On form, the US deserves to be there for the moment. Whether it will continue is another matter and quite up in the air. England, for instance, came in from the cold on the backs of a great ManU team. When they go south there may not be enough top English players to justify continuing in the top ten. The same with Portugal and on and on. So if the current crop of US players continue to develop we may well stay just behind the elite for a good haul, maybe even for good. JIM DOW
let me write that again, forgot to add something maybe its because the usa and mexico play a gazillion HOME friendlies and win most of them (yes you dont want to admit it, but games in the usa are home also home friendlies for mexico)
is it me, or every time the rankings come out (or just randomly) does some new member start a thread like this? how many times do we have to explain that the rankings are crap, nothing more.
From the FIFA site. 3.4 Status of a Match The importance of a game is also considered - a World Cup encounter is weighted more heavily than a friendly match. The method applied here is to use a pre-calculated factor by which the points totals of a given match are multiplied. The factors used are: Friendly match x 1.00 Continental championship preliminary x 1.50 World Cup preliminary match x 1.50 Continental championship finals match x 1.75 FIFA Confederations Cup match x 1.75 World Cup finals match x 2.00 Not much diffrence between a gold cup match and a Confederation match. What is intreasting is 3.3 Home and Away Games To make an allowance for the extra handicap of playing away from home, the away-team is awarded a small bonus of 3 points. For games played on neutral territory or during World Cup final rounds there are no such bonus points.