In defense of the FIFA World rankings.

If there's one thing that everyone in the world of soccer agrees on, it's that the FIFA World Rankings are about as reliable as the electrics on a 70s Fiat. Here's a sampling of the conventional wisdom.

Steven Goff: "FIFA rankings are complete nonsense."
Dan Loney: "All the Coca-Cola rankings prove is that American Samoa and Guam didn't win the World Cup recently."
Grant Wahl: "... any self-respecting soccer fan knows the screwy FIFA rankings make college football's BCS poll look like an Oliver Wendell Holmes ruling "
Jon DeNunzio: "All mention of the FIFA/Coca-Cola Rankings on this blog are banned."

I could go on, but I'm sick of Googling and anyway, you get the point.

Allow me to offer a slightly contrarian view of the world rankings. Yes, they're stupid if you use them as a basis for comparisons and predicting results. The 4th ranked (?!?!?) USA was handily dispatched by 19th ranked Germany (back then they were 5th and 22nd) as anybody would expect.

But I think the rankings are a fairly reliable indicator of form; that is to say, they give a pretty good indication of how many games teams have won and lost over the last cycle. And let's face it, in terms of form, Germany have thoroughly deserved their ranking; tanking in Euro 2004, and losing friendlies against inferior opponents. Only a semi-decent Confed Cup have kept them in the top 25. And while the Czech Republic's #2 ranking is often given as evidence for the silliness of the whole exercise, it does reflect that over the last few years, they've won a lot of games, with only Greece in Euro 2004 and Holland in recent qualifying, stopping them.

So as long as you take this with a substantial grain of salt, you can get something out of these rankings. For instance, the Swiss have a seemingly low ranking of 35, an indicator that they tied a lot of games to qualify.

Mind you, as Dan alludes to in the article I linked to above, the ranking system really favors the USA. First off, we play a lot of friendlies on home soil, much more so than other nations, and we tend to win them comfortably. Moreover, our so-called continental championship is remarkably lame, and is a competition we tend to do very well at (once again, it's at home).

Anyway as a system goes, it's light-years from perfect, or good even, but I don't think it's quite the useless distraction it's always made out to be.