Why The Ranking Formula Had To Be Rewritten

International football rankings determine seeding, which determines draws, which affects who qualifies. When the formula could be exploited by fixture choice, the exploitation was rational.

Averaging created the wrong incentive

A ranking that averages points earned over a period rewards playing fewer matches if the expected value of an additional match is below a team's current average.

Under such a system, a highly ranked team can protect its position by playing less, and by choosing opponents whose defeat carries a high weighting.

Associations noticed. Scheduling decisions began to reflect ranking arithmetic alongside preparation needs, which is not what the ranking was supposed to measure.

Why the friendly became a problem

Friendlies carried weight in the formula, so the choice of opponent was a ranking decision as well as a sporting one.

Teams could improve their position by arranging matches against opposition with favorable weighting rather than against opposition that would prepare them.

Since seeding flows from rankings, the incentive fed back into competitive outcomes. A scheduling choice could change a World Cup group.

What a rating system does differently

A rating approach assigns each team a number and updates it after every match by the difference between the result and what the ratings predicted.

Because the update depends on expectation, beating a weaker team gains almost nothing and losing to one costs a great deal. Playing more matches is neither rewarded nor punished by itself.

The incentive to avoid matches disappears, which was the specific defect being addressed. The system is descended from chess rating methods and behaves similarly.

What the rewrite did not fix

Confederations play largely within themselves, so ratings across confederations are connected by relatively few matches and are correspondingly less certain.

Any rating system inherits this. Comparing teams that rarely meet is an extrapolation, and the number's precision overstates how much is actually known.

Competition weightings remain a judgment: how much more a tournament match counts than a friendly is set by administrators, not derived from data.

Why the transition was awkward

Switching formulas means the ranking series breaks. Positions before and after the change are not measuring the same thing, even though they are printed identically.

Governing bodies handled this by initializing the new system from the old ratings, which preserves continuity of appearance while the underlying method differs.

Historical ranking comparisons therefore cross a methodological seam. It is a familiar problem in sports record-keeping: the number survives the redefinition and the caveat does not.

The phrase you hear in selection meetings is that a player is one-dimensional. It is said as a criticism. I have never fully understood why, given that the format is short enough that a team only needs a handful of dimensions in total and can distribute them across eleven bodies.

Consider the batter who can only hit down the ground and only against pace. He is useless in the middle overs against two spinners on a turning surface. He is also, in the right six deliveries, the most valuable player on the field, because the thing he does badly never comes up and the thing he does well comes up repeatedly.

The counter is obvious and it is about flexibility. If a wicket falls at the wrong moment, a specialist walks into a situation he cannot handle, and you have burned a slot. That is real. But it is a scheduling problem, not a talent problem, and scheduling problems have solutions that talent problems do not.

What actually happens is worse than either. Sides pick a squad full of players who are competent in every phase and outstanding in none, then wonder why they keep posting adequate totals and losing to somebody who had one man go berserk for four overs. Competence across the board is a way of guaranteeing you are never the reason a match turns.

I would rather carry two narrow players and accept that in a third of matches one of them is dead weight. The distribution of outcomes matters more than the average, because you do not get half a trophy for finishing consistently mid-table in a knockout competition.

There is a coaching dimension to this that gets ignored. Telling a specialist to broaden his game usually makes him worse at the thing he was picked for, because the technique that lets a player hit a length ball over long-on is not the technique that lets him work it into the leg side. They fight each other. He ends up in the middle, hitting neither shot with conviction, and within a season he is a squad player.

Leave him alone. Let him be strange.

The best selections I have watched were not the most complete cricketers on the list. They were the ones whose weakness the captain had a plan to hide.