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How Strong Are Soccer Teams? The “Host Paradox” and Other Counterintuitive Properties of FIFA’s Former Ranking System

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  • Marek M. Kaminski

    (Department of Political Science and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697, USA)

Abstract

I investigate the paradoxes associated with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) point-based ranking of national soccer teams. The ranking has been plagued with paradoxes that incentivize teams to avoid playing friendly matches, i.e., matches that are not part of any official FIFA tournament or preliminaries, and applying other counterintuitive strategies. The most spectacular paradox was the dramatic underrating of the hosts of major tournaments. For a long time, host teams, which were absent from preliminary matches, would play only friendly matches that awarded few points. Here, I present three models that estimate the magnitude of the resulting “host effect” at 14.2–16 positions. Such an estimate counteracts the intuition that a large investment in hosting a tournament should result in an improvement in the host team’s standing. However, as discussed here, a given host’s low ranking could decrease interest in the tournament, and likely result in a major loss of advertisement revenue.

Suggested Citation

  • Marek M. Kaminski, 2022. "How Strong Are Soccer Teams? The “Host Paradox” and Other Counterintuitive Properties of FIFA’s Former Ranking System," Games, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-22, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jgames:v:13:y:2022:i:2:p:22-:d:763597
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. L'aszl'o Csat'o & L'aszl'o Marcell Kiss & Zsombor Sz'adoczki, 2023. "The allocation of FIFA World Cup slots based on the ranking of confederations," Papers 2310.19100, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2024.
    2. Alex Krumer & Juan D. Moreno-Ternero, 2023. "The Allocation of Additional Slots for the FIFA World Cup," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 24(7), pages 831-850, October.
    3. Lapré Michael A. & Palazzolo Elizabeth M., 2023. "The evolution of seeding systems and the impact of imbalanced groups in FIFA Men’s World Cup tournaments 1954–2022," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 19(4), pages 317-332, December.
    4. L'aszl'o Csat'o, 2023. "Club coefficients in the UEFA Champions League: Time for shift to an Elo-based formula," Papers 2304.09078, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2023.

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