Alex Massie Alex Massie

England are Third Best Football Team in the World, Boffins Say!

Sure Barack Obama won the Presidential election last year. But he wasn’t the only big winner. Nate Silver, the number-cruncher behind FiveThirtyEight.com was another victor, having predicted the result with uncanny accuracy. Silver is a sabermetrician, which is to say that he began his public life as an analyst for the brilliant Baseball Prospectus years before he brought his statistical nous to politics.

Using regression analyses, among other tools, to predict political outcomes is one thing; trying to create a predictive rankings system for international football is quite another. By “quite another” I mean vastly more difficult. Nonetheless, Silver has attempted this. So, as a rival to FIFA’s rankings (which are, as he admits, less useless than was once the case) Silver has come up with his own football league table. Unlike other such enterprises, however, they are also designed to be predictive as well as reflective.

According to Silver, England are the third best team in the world. His top ten:

1. Brazil
2. Spain
3. England
4. The Netherlands
5. Argentina
6. Germany
7. Portugal
8. Chile
9. France
10. Uruguay








Silver explains the project here and, in more detail, his methodolgy here. (Warning, there are some head-wrecking numbers at that latter link.) Right now, in other words, Silver thinks England good enough to reach a World Cup semi-final.

But there seem a few obvious problems with this. For one thing, an algorithm that a) values home advantage and b) also takes account of margin of victory might seem ill-suited to a competition such as the World Cup Finals in which 31 of 32 teams play one another on neutral territory and in which, most of the time, winning 1-0 is as useful as winning by three or four goals. To be fair, Silver acknowleges somthing of this and even though he rates Italy as just the 12th best team, I doubt he’d really pretend that Chile are better than the Italians.

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