Next month Australia will be entering a nervous two legged playoff against Central American opponent, Honduras.
The winner with the highest aggregate (or depending on away goals rule) over the two matches will qualify for the World Cup in Russia next year. A few weeks later on December 1, the FIFA World Cup draw will take place in Moscow.
The draw will be comprised 32 teams and will be divided into four pots. In previous World Cup draws, it depended on teams who are located geographically to form pots from two to four, following pot one, which is the seeded teams.
But for Russia 2018, the pots will be determined by the FIFA rankings. In the AFC confederation, Japan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Korea Rep have all directly qualified. While Australia and Syria were forced into a playoff tie after finishing third in their respective groups.
When the FIFA rankings came out in September, Iran was the top-ranked AFC nation at 25, while Syria was the lowest out of all the six teams at 75. Here is the overall overview of the teams rankings from the AFC in September.
Iran – 25
Japan – 40
Australia – 50
Korea Rep. – 51
Saudi Arabia – 53
Syria – 75
When the October FIFA rankings were released, there was a huge change, especially around Japan and Australia. The countries that had directly qualified, Japan, Korea and Iran all took part in friendlies, while Australia and Syria were involved in two world cup qualifying matches.
As has been the case, the rankings points are more heavily weighted when teams take part in competitive matches over friendlies. With Australia overcoming Syria, the Socceroos rankings went north. Here is the overall overview of the teams positions from the AFC in October.
(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
Iran – 34
Australia – 43
Japan – 44
Korea Rep. – 62
Saudi Arabia – 63
Syria – 77
Australia jumped seven places to 43, while Japan slipped four places to 44, and consequently, are now ranked behind the Socceroos. Other notable changes, Iran slipped nine places from 25 to 34, Korea Rep. slid down 12 places from 50 to 62, while Saudi Arabia’s rankings also went south from 53 to 63.
Significantly what it has down to Japan, Korea Rep and Saudi Arabia is that it has condemned all three to pot four as they are all ranked below Australia.
In pot four, the three AFC teams are joined by CONCACAF entrant, Panama (49). In addition what it means is that the October edtion of the FIFA world rankings will be used to allocate all qualified teams into the four pots. Each pot will contain eight teams.
For Australia, they do have an outside chance of getting into pot three and avoid a possible group of death. For it to occur, the Socceroos obviously need to beat Honduras in early to mid November to qualify for Russia.
Furthermore the Socceroos need four other teams who are ranked lower to qualify. These four equations need to transpire.
1. Ivory Coast (61) or Morocco (48) qualify. The good news with this scenario, is that they are the top two teams in their group. Only one can qualify.
2. Need Senegal (32) to not qualify. That may be unlikely as Senegal are on top of their group on eight points, leading by two over Burkina Faso and Cape Verde, and more importantly with a game in hand.
3. Greece (47) to beat Croatia (18)
and…
4. New Zealand (122) to defeat Peru (10)
Both of those match ups are two-legged playoffs
As I said earlier, the Socceroos have an outside chance if all four possibilities come to fruition. But if Australia does qualify, it would appear more than likely that their name will be drawn out from pot four and the possibility of getting themselves into another group of death. But of course before we put the cart before the horse, there’s this little matter of downing Honduras.
Nevertheless, if those four outcomes surprisingly do occur in Australia’s favour, the green and gold would be delighted to be in pot three. But one country that won’t be so delighted is Japan. When the Blue Samurai directly qualified, they were positioned 40th, ten places higher than Australia.
(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
It’s somewhat unfair on Japan that Australia has played two more extra world cup qualifiers to boost their rankings, while the team from the rising sun did everything right to directly qualify in the first place. Ironically, when Japan qualified, their ranking was 40th. A position, where they would’ve found themselves a better chance of landing in pot three.
Perhaps what FIFA should do is not include rankings points when there’s playoff world cup qualifiers. Or at the very least, playoff qualifying matches should be weighted the same way as friendly games.
For many years, the machinations and workings of the FIFA rankings have baffled football fans worldwide. But in fair play and justice, Australia should be denied pot three.
Anyway, first things first, Ange Postecoglou’s men need to overcome a tricky opponent in Honduras in order to get a plane ticket to Russia. If Australia don’t win, they will miss out on a pot of gold.
Kevin
Guest
Agree the FIFA ranking system is a total dud. Clearly favors teams who play more qualifiers for major tournaments....nothing new there. However if the rankings are so badly skewed and teams in pot 4 deserve to be ranked higher then it also means some teams in pots 1 2 &3 should be ranked lower. So obviously a team from Pot 4 could be the best team in their WC group. It's a lottery either way. Win at least one group match and u will probably make the next round.....not that onerous a task is it!
LuckyEddie
Guest
Of course it's about helping teams and TV. Put everyone in a fair and open draw and the best team at the end wins. This system discriminates against a lot of countries to keep the ratings up. AS a leftie would say "i'm outraged by the seeding system". But seriously by the time the number of countries is increased they'll need a cement truck for the balls in the rort. Still there will be a lot of participation trophies awarded by pay TV. Shame the WC will be a joke by then.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
If you go right to the bottom of this page it shows the confederation coefficients: http://www.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/procedure/men.html As I said, it's exactly the same for all confederations other than UEFA and CONMEBOL. I don't see how this could be the case if it was a purely mathematically calculated number. I have no problem including friendlies in the rankings with a much lower value, but if you play a game and win it, that should always have a positive effect on your ranking, not negative whether it's because it's a friendly, or because you are playing a lowly ranked opposition. Just as the friendlies could cause your ranking to go down, so could playing a low ranked opponent. Eg, If most games you play are against teams ranked between 20 and 80 and then you play a team ranked 150 in the world, even if you smash them, you'll still only get a third of the points for that game as you'd get for beating a team ranked 50 in the world, and as such, playing and winning that game causes your ranking points to drop. This is also why the confederation coefficient causes a double whammy. Playing in a confederation where you play more lower ranked teams negatively impacts on your ranking anyway, and then they multiply that by 0.85 to take it down even more!
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
The seedings aren't about helping teams to win the whole tournament, but trying to ensure that overall we have the stronger teams competing against each other when they reach the knock-out stages, and if a lower ranked team reaches the knock-out stage it's because they deserve it having beaten some higher ranked opponents, rather than just because they got an easy draw with a group full of lowly teams
LuckyEddie
Guest
Chris teams like Argentina and Brazil cannot get drawn against each other in the first round. They are protected and it's the same for the major European Countries. If as you say the best team will win regardless why have seedings and why protect some countries. It's all a bit of a joke at the behest of the TV networks and the dodgy crew at FIFA.
Griffo
Roar Guru
I think friendlies do need to be addressed. The relative importance of the match should indicate the desirability to play and win the higher value important ones (world cups) but not everyone qualifies for those, hence slightly lesser qualifier importance, and so on. Friendlies, at a 1.0 value of importance have no bearing on the calculation, so it leaves the confed coefficient to maximise points. I don't recall seeing the full coefficient breakdown recently, but there are adjustments post world cup. How far back these are calculated would be interesting. I think the idea is that playing mostly friendlies shouldn't mean you rank high over someone who just qualifies for something like a world cup and don't win any games. FIFA has reviewed the formula in the past (the last major change was post 2006 World Cup, iirc) so no doubt it could happen again. Given the ELO background, and the fact FIFA uses ELO for women's ranking, there is no reason ELO couldn't be adopted for the mens rankings.
Griffo
Roar Guru
Agree on not using the confed coefficient for some things - I think in multi-confederation tournaments (eg: a World Cup and Confeds Cup) it makes sense: if you beat a team from a 'stronger' confederation, then you should get the better points using the coefficient. For other times a win using similar criteria values should yield the same points, regardless of your confederation (eg: Asian Cup, Euros...). I would ditch friendlies altogether from calculations.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
Definitely. When we were in Oceania we needed to play lots of friendlies because there wasn't a lot of qualifying matches, but when we have such a full qualification schedule, friendlies are less needed. The idea of needing to minimise the number of friendlies to maximise your ranking is really dumb though. They need to do something about that. Having friendlies automatically cause your ranking to drop even if you win them is completely stupid!
At work
Roar Rookie
I would be supportive of scrapping any points for friendlies, as they are only practice matches so should not be counted in anyway towards rankings. Only competitive matches are logical to count towards a rank.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
I think any rankings system is going to be flawed, but one that sees your ranking actually go backwards for playing a friendly even if you win it is definitely highly flawed.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
They say the coefficient is based on passed performance in the World Cup, but if that's the case, how do all confederations other than Europe and South America have exactly the same coefficient. There's no way that would be the case if it was some sort of performance based calculation. The idea that playing friendlies will pretty much guarantee a rankings drop even if you win the friendly needs to be addressed. That's pretty poor. If the rankings are put together by averaging out points per game and friendlies therefore are always going to drop the average because you get so few points for them, they'd be much better off just ignoring friendlies altogether. Maybe instead of averaging out all games, what they should do is the average for all friendlies + the average for all qualifiers + the average for all confederation level comps + the average for all W/C games. That way all rankings points become positives, but some boost the ranking more than others.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
I don't know that the draw has a lot to do with what countries win the world cup. If a country was good enough to win the world cup then they should be good enough to get out of their group even if they were in pot 4 and pitted against 3 really good teams. It will definitely reduce the likelihood of lesser teams reaching the knock-out phase. You'll really need to beat a "major" footballing nation or two to get out of your group. But that should impact on winning the cup as such, as a team good enough to win the whole thing would surely be good enough to get out of their group even if they somehow got stuck with three top 10 teams in their group. FIFA talk the talk about globalising, but their actions certainly seem more in line with an organisation that really wants to make sure that the status quo of Europe and South America being dominant remains. I think there are a lot of people in FIFA that are trying to make sure the first WC win by a team outside of those continents is delayed as long as possible!
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
I agree to an extent, but this story is about "have Japan been dudded", and the fact that the rankings have an inherent bias in them means that every team not in South America or Europe has to an extent been dudded by using a biased rankings system for it. (eg, If Australia had beaten the Netherlands in that World Cup game, we'd have only got 85% of the points that Chile would have got if they'd beaten the Netherlands in their World Cup game. We are both playing the same team in the same context, yet, because of the confederation we come from we get less points for the same result). When it comes to WC qualifiers, we play against teams with lower ranks, so we get less rankings points for wins against them anyway, but then that gets doubled up by multiplying that amount by 0.85 to bring it down even further. So if a Euro qualifier saw a team beat the 50th ranked team: 3 * 2.5 * (200-50) * 0.99 = 1113.75 points If an Asian qualifier saw a team beat the 50th ranked team: 3 * 2.5 * (200-50) * 0.85 = 956.25 So despite beating a team with the exact same ranking, there is a significant reduction in rankings points simply because of the confederation. There certainly needs to be something done about how the rankings points are combined together to form the overall ranking too. The idea that playing a friendly pretty much guarantees that your ranking will go down even if you win is pretty stupid. If that's what's going to happen with friendlies they would be better off just discounting them from rankings points completely.
Bob
Guest
Any system that can rank Australia above Japan a few weeks after a league table for World Cup qualification proved the opposite is a Dud. It would be like giving the gold medal to the Bronze medal play-off winner. The system is a dud and anyone that defends it a dud.
Realist
Guest
Nothing like the FIFA rankings then. So why are you trying to compare apples with oranges?
chris
Guest
Suddenly the AFC nations don't look as poor as their FIFA rankings would suggest : )
chris
Guest
Arena is a w*nker from what I've seen of him and have read of him.
chris
Guest
Thanks Waz. I didnt realise a few ranking points could make such a difference to some of these teams.
jamesb
Guest
Wow! Elo rankings has Iran at 21!
Nemesis
Guest
Do you realize that we will have played 20 WC Qualifiers, which is more than any other nation to get to Russia? Plus we've had 3 Confed Cup matches. Throw in a couple of friendlies against Greece & 1 vs Brasil. I doubt there has been more than 1 spare slot that we didn't play a match but had a training camp instead.