The Wealth of World Cup Nations

I am a bit of a nerd this way, but one of the things I really enjoy about the World Cup is that I get to learn about other countries. As soon as I learned that Togo and Angola qualified, for example, I immediately wanted to know more about those countries. Today I was thinking about how cool it is that countries both small and large, and rich and poor, are able to share the experience of being part of the world’s greatest sporting event. This got my mind working - no small feat these days - and I decided to take a look at how the World Cup countries rank in terms of gross domestic product per capita. I also thought it would be interesting to see how this compares to the latest FIFA rankings. As you can see, economic power does not necessarily mean football power.

Here are the rankings with the order of things being: rank of wealth, country name, GDP per capita, latest FIFA ranking.

4 United States, $41,000, #5
10 Switzerland, $35,000, #35
18 Australia, $32,000, #44
20 United Kingdom, $30,900, #9
21 Netherlands, $30,500, #3
22 Japan, $30,400, #18
24 France, $29,900, #8
25 Germany, 29,700, #22
27 Sweden, $29,600, #16
30 Italy, $28,300, #12
38 Spain, $25,100, #6
51 South Korea, $20,300, #31
57 Portugal, $18,400, #10
58 Czech Republic, $18,100, #2
68 Argentina, $13,600, #4
73 Poland, $12,700, #26
74 Trinidad and Tobago, $12,700, #49
77 Croatia, $11,600, #19
85 Costa Rica, $10,000, #25
86 Mexico, $10,000, #7
93 Brazil, $8,500, #1
98 Iran, $8,100, #19
105 Tunisia, $7,600, #24
114 Ukraine, $6,800, #42
137 Paraguay, $4,900, #33
146 Ecuador, $3,900, #38
166 Serbia and Montenegro, $2,600, #46
167 Angola, $2,500, #60
169 Ghana, $2,500, #50
194 Togo $ 1,600, #58
198 Cote d’Ivoire, $ 1,400, #32