There is no such thing as a perfect ranking system, not when they rely on the historical – a team’s results over a period of years – while the teams themselves rely on the unpredictable and the ephemeral – the weather, the quality of the pitch, whether one or two star players happen to be fit and in form on a given day. Let’s keep this all in proportion: no team has ever lost a match because of their ranking, but they have lost a match because of a lasagne.
Uefa ranks its nations using a very different method to Fifa. Uefa does not count friendlies and does no go back four years, as Fifa do, but three qualifying cycles, so the earliest matches relevant to their current calculations were played in September 2010 (so the likelihood of, say, Dele Alli, who could well be a member of England’s squad, having a good summer will be influenced by games played in his absence when he was 14).
Still, you have to conduct a draw somehow, and Uefa has at least warned us, well in advance, how it’s going to do it. As recently as 2000 nobody was told how the draw would be organised until two days before it happened. On that occasion teams were eventually put in pots based entirely on their record in qualification for that tournament, leaving those which had required a play-off – Denmark, Turkey, Slovenia and Kevin Keegan’s doomed England – in the fourth and final group and facing near-certain disaster (though in the end Turkey qualified from a weak Group B). Four years earlier there had only been four seeds – England, as the hosts, Denmark, as the defending champions, plus Germany and Spain because they looked a bit tasty – with all the other sides allocated to groups at random.
Of course it is best not to get too hung up on seedings. After all in 1988 England had been one of only two top seeds, alongside the hosts, West Germany, and it didn’t stop them coming bottom of their group. Back then, however, there were only eight teams in the finals and both groups were pretty daunting; now there are 24 and the possibility of an easy draw exists, made significantly more likely if a team is in Pot 1. There is, for example, a chance that one of the top seeds will be grouped with the teams considered by Fifa to be the world’s 29th, 35th and 38th best (so with an average Fifa ranking of 34), while another will end up with numbers 10, 16 and 17 (an average Fifa ranking of 14).
Create your own draw
These two possible groups illustrate how different Fifa’s rankings are from Uefa’s. While Fifa would consider one a group of death and the other a bit of a hoot, Uefa would consider them perfectly matched, with near-identical average rankings of 20 and 19 respectively. Under Uefa’s methodology Wales are the 28th best national side in Europe and thus among the worst teams in Pot 4; under Fifa’s they are the 17th best in the entire world, above the rest of Pot 4, all but one of Pot 3, half of Pot 2 and the top-seeded hosts. Meanwhile Russia, who Uefa considers to be appreciably better than Wales (they are ninth), are considered by Fifa to be noticeably worse (24th).
As ever, small margins can make a big difference when it comes to the draw. Italy, for example, feel aggrieved that they are outside the group of first seeds, for which – with France guaranteed a spot as hosts whatever their ranking – they needed to finish qualifying among Uefa’s top five nations. And with two games to go they were indeed fifth, but at that stage they led Belgium by the wafer-thin margin of just two points (to illustrate how close this race was, Italy had 33,714 points at the time, making their lead over Belgium equivalent to six thousandths of a percent of their total. To put it another way, if you visualise Italy’s tally of coefficient points as 176 pints of beer, their lead over Belgium was a teaspoonful).
Unlike Fifa, Uefa includes in their calculations not just results but goals, so it would not be enough for Italy simply to win their remaining fixtures – they had to win them at least as handsomely as Belgium did theirs. In the end they won 3-1 in Azerbaijan and 2-1 at home to Norway, and had they only kept two clean sheets they would be in Pot 1. As it was Belgium won 4-1 in Andorra and 3-1 against Israel and took the final Pot 1 spot by a margin of 97 points.
In fact what truly separated them was that Italy laboured against Malta, the worst team in their group, beating them 1-0 both at home and away, while Belgium thrashed Andorra by an aggregate score of 10-1. Fifa’s ranking system takes the opponent’s strength into account (sometimes a little unfairly, effectively punishing the sides drawn against the weakest teams); Uefa’s does not and then throws goals into the equation, massively favouring the sides with the worst opponents.
So England are a generous third in Uefa’s rankings, helped to a great extent by having played San Marino in their last two qualifying campaigns, which are given the greatest weighting in the calculations. They won these four matches by an aggregate 24-0 while Italy, who have played the comparatively obdurate Malta in their last two qualifying campaigns, won those matches by an aggregate score of 6-0. Had the two teams simply swapped the weakest teams in their 2014 and 2016 qualifying groups Italy would certainly now be ranked in the top six, and it could be England now glumly preparing for a daunting draw.
As it stands, though, both Fifa and Uefa would agree on the five top seeds and beyond that it’s all a bit of a muddle. It’s best to approach draws with an open mind and a sense of unbridled optimism: sometimes a daunting, top-seeded opponent is only a twanged Cristiano Ronaldo hamstring away from relative mediocrity.
Besides, in many ways a team engaged in thorough long-term planning should probably be hoping for the hardest group possible – after all, Fifa would give a team 1693 ranking points for beating Austria, their top-ranked side in Uefa’s Pot 2, and just 1524 for beating the worst of them, Ukraine. These things can make a difference: after all, the World Cup draw is just a couple of years away.
Euro 2016 draw
Pot 1 Spain, Germany, England, Portugal, France and Belgium
Pot 2 Italy, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, Croatia and Ukraine
Pot 3 Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary
Pot 4 Turkey, Republic of Ireland, Iceland, Wales, Albania and Northern Ireland
