Compelling Soccer

ESPN's just posted Nate Silver's SPI rankings, which is his system of ranking the world of International soccer. Never too early to get started on the WC promotion right? Slow Wednesday in November just before the final part of qualification is just as good a time as any to launch a system.

Since it's Nate Silver, I'm looking at this with intrigue. The guy's had a lot of success with this type of thing; from Baseball Prospectus to FiveThirtyEight.com. He discloses his methodology which nice. Some of it goes off leaps of faith, which he admits, but overall I don't see too many problems with it thus far. Or at least I think it makes more sense than a personal ranking or heaven forbid, FIFA's. Having read through the length explanation, I can't say I understand all of it, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for now. The real test comes in SA next year. Until then every ranking has to be taken with a grain of salt anyway.

But here are my thoughts on the rankings:

-South America... just wow. Every team is in the top 50 except Peru, who is 59th. But this probably shouldn't be shocking. South America is the strongest region of the world. They have arguably two of the best five teams in the world and there are few teams that could be considered cupcakes. It also puts Argentina's rough road in perspective. One or two slip ups against the weaker sisters that aren't that weak and suddenly you're stuck in must win games against teams very close or on your level. It's little wonder why Guyana and Suriname try to qualify out of CONCACAF. And people who want the US to switch to CONMEBOL should look at this list. Qualification goes from a near sure thing to a long a difficult struggle.

-Europe has the potential for any team to be the worst to qualify out of, since you could end up in a group with a bunch of top fifty teams. On the other hand you could easily end up in a group with a couple of absolute jokes too. Slightly over half of UEFA is on par or better than the entirety of CONMEBOL. If you take out Peru, then it's slightly under half of Europe better than South America. Still it's no joke to qualify out of there either. It can be the most difficult. It can be CONCACAF level. Luck of the draw there.

-If the rankings are correct, then Bob Bradley does deserve more credit than me and a lot of his critics have given him. CONCACAF comes off as being about the third region in strength compared to the rest of the world, trailing Europe and South America, but right there with Africa and well ahead of Asia and Oceania. Granted it's bottom end is ugly, but in the Hexagonal, the US faced Mexico (18th), Honduras (22nd) and Costa Rica (36th). They also saw El Salvador (63rd) and Trinidad and Tobago (71st). So while making it through to the final round of qualifying the US played its share of solid squads when it arrived.

Of course since CONCACAF has three automatic spots and one play in spot, ranking essentially confirms the idea that the US absolutely needed to be one of the top four teams and probably locked into the top three. In which case, the critique of Bradley not proving a lot yet is also accurate. So in essence, he beat better teams than we gave him credit for, but the US should have been one of the top teams in CONCACAF anyway.

I've heard a few people say positive things about Honduras. This ranking does provide evidence that they might be a decent bet to make it to the knock out stages. Also good luck to Costa Rica facing Uruguay (10th) in the playoff.

-AFC is weaker than I might have suspected, though in reality it's just the Socceroos (Australia) and South Korea that one ever thinks of as Asian powers. South Korea is also strange because they made it far in 2002 largely because they were home. The Socceroos moved to Asia because at the time the road was better than in Oceania where they had to face a South American team to qualify. (Now I believe they face an Asian team, but they still don't get an automatic berth just by winning the region) So their ranking as a team that might have had trouble cracking the top three in CONCACAF probably will piss their fans off but is somewhat deserved. The Italy heartbreak was 3 and half years ago after all.

I am somewhat surprised by Japan being ahead of Korea.

-The biggest complaints I've read on the comment thread is Italy being ranked too low and Ivory Coast being ranked too high. I haven't seen enough of the Ivory Coast to comment (which probably goes double for every single commentator on that story) but I understand Italy coming in at 12th. They've been relatively poor in qualifying, they got ousted in the Confederations Cup, with their only win coming against a US squad with 10 men. (They were trailing at the half in that game as well) Their World Cup win was 3 and a half years ago and European squads get tremendous advantages when playing in Europe. This is supposedly a ranking based on strength for the cup, in which case the fact it's in Africa has to be factored in. How did winning the WC at home in 1998 work out for France when they played in Korea and Japan in 2002?

So it should promote discussion if nothing else. As with any Nate Silver prediction, I'll be looking forward to how it turns out come 2010.