The World Cup as a League Table, After Two Games

June 22nd, 2010 | by: Rob | View Comments

So, one of the most exciting things about the World Cup is that you can compare all the best countries in the World and decide just how good everyone is. As the teams play in the Group/Knockout format however, most of that is conjecture. Except, now it isn’t.

I’ve take the 32 teams who have played at the World Cup, and ranked them all after two games, based on how many points/goal difference they’d have if they World Cup was a league.

The reading, as you would probably expect, looks great for South Americans. The African nations, however, aren’t quite doing so well so far.

01. Argentina
02. Brazil
03. Holland
04. Chile
05. Portugal
06. Uruguay
07. Mexico
08. Paraguay
09. Slovenia
10. Ghana
11. Germany
12. Spain
13. Japan
14. Serbia
15. Switzerland
16. South Korea
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17. Denmark
18. Greece
19. USA
20. Italy
21. New Zealand
22. England
23. Algeria
24. Ivory Coast
25. Slovakia
26. France
27. South Africa
28. Australia
29. Cameroon
30. Nigeria
31. Honduras
32. North Korea

North Korea obviously sit bottom due to that dreadful defeat against Portugal, a game in which they played well for the first 45, so its safe to say these don’t tell the whole picture. Its safe to say though that most of the nations below the half way marker haven’t had all that much to cheer about.

Obviously as well it is just pure results, and doesn’t take into account the fact that, say New Zealand wouldn’t be expected to do as well as Italy or England and yet sit among them happily, but what do you think? It is the fairest analysis possible in the situation? Its really interesting if nothing else.

And obviously its all going to change as the teams run out again, but it may be an interesting thing to return to.