Fifa World Rankings February 2008

There is little change in the top 20 teams of this month's Fifa world rankings. Ghana burst in to the top 20 after the African Cup of Nations they hosted and came in third. Cameroon, who Ghana defeated in the 3rd/4th play off are 19th.

Argentina are number one followed by Brazil and Italy. England are in 11th place, Scotland 14th and the USA 26th.

1 Argentina
2 Brazil
3 Italy
4 Spain
5 Germany
6 Czech Republic
7 France
8 Portugal
9 Netherlands
10 Greece
11 England
12 Croatia
13 Romania
14 Ghana
14 Scotland
16 Mexico
17 Cameroon
18 Turkey
19 Bulgaria
20 Poland


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Fifa World Rankings January 2008

There is little change in the top 20 teams of this month's Fifa world rankings. The USA and Nigeria change places in 20th and 19th position.

Argentina are number one followed by Brazil and Italy. England are in 12th place, Scotland 14th and the USA 20th.

1 Argentina
2 Brazil
3 Italy
4 Spain
5 Germany
6 Czech Republic
7 France
8 Portugal
9 Netherlands
10 Croatia
11 Greece
12 England
13 Romania
14 Scotland
15 Mexico
16 Turkey
17 Colombia
18 Bulgaria
19 USA
20 Nigeria

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Fifa World Rankings Dec 2007

There is no change in the top 20 teams of this month's Fifa world rankings.

Argentina are number one followed by Brazil and Italy. England are in 12th place, Scotland 14th and the USA 19th.

1 Argentina
2 Brazil
3 Italy
4 Spain
5 Germany
6 Czech Republic
7 France
8 Portugal
9 Netherlands
10 Croatia
11 Greece
12 England
13 Romania
14 Scotland
15 Mexico
16 Turkey
17 Colombia
18 Bulgaria
19 USA
20 Nigeria

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England all played out again

The Emperor has no clothes and it’s official.

For the first time within the walls of the awesome citadel that is the new Wembley Stadium, the English national team has come a cropper in a big way, and this time there can be no hiding from the naked truth.

Now let these sombre words ring out across our green and pleasant land: England are a mediocre football nation and it’s high time we accepted it.

One final appearance in 57 continuous years of international football competitions tells its own story and cannot by any logic justify the perennial Mount Everest of expectations heaped upon the Three Lions.

As the 3-2 victory over England by a competent yet not exceptional Croatian eleven on Wednesday proved once more, there is simply no case for believing we deserve a place at the high table of the world’s football nations, so please don’t try to make it.

After such a miserable and humiliating surrender, can anyone seriously believe we can win the 2010 World Cup? Will the patriotic punters be out in force again to waste their money, like they have for the last forty years since we won the World Cup at home?

That the English invented the sport and still sustain a 92-team professional league is utterly immaterial if the national team consistently fails to perform, yet year after year, an inferno of fan fervour is stoked up by London’s boorish tabloid media with no basis in reality.

But the media is only partly to blame for the unrealistic expectations and to a great extent is only a mirror of the national zeitgeist.

The obscenely ballooning waistline of the cash cow that is the FA Premier League is also only reinforcing an existing tunnel vision shared by millions throughout the home of football.

There is a foreign influx in our leagues and globalization all around us, but it clearly does not follow that a great domestic league can produce a world-class national team.

So who do we blame this time?

The usual suspects for the latest shambles are lining up and while they all shoulder a part of the blame, are mostly red herrings while the prime suspect is still at large.

Steve McClaren is not the main culprit and I take no pride in having predicted as soon as he was appointed that he would fail.

Although guiding your club to 15th place in the Premier League is not the best preparation for coaching your country, McClaren had served apprenticeships under Alex Ferguson and Sven-Goran Eriksson and there were no realistic alternatives for England last summer.

While some fans are slating McClaren for starting with 4-5-1 at home, without Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney his striking options were limited and when reinforcements did arrive in the shape of Darren Bent and Jermain Defoe, the much-needed punch up front was still lacking.

In fact, the catalyst for England’s comeback was the arrival of David Beckham, in perhaps his last national team appearance, after halftime, a player from Major League Soccer who provided an artistry and finesse with the ball otherwise lacking from his team on the night.

The English players’ superstar salaries are almost irrelevant too. Serie A pays huge wages but that never stopped Italy’s national team winning the World Cup impressively last summer. And English players certainly do not lack passion. If anything, they play with too much heart and not enough head, yet England critics routinely bemoan a lack of passion and self-belief as the reasons for falling short.

That there may be too many foreign players in England for the national team’s good is also an argument that looks shakier by the day. In fact, on the evidence of last night, no wonder Arsene Wenger shops overseas.

The dissections and post mortems on the corpse of England’s latest failure are everywhere, though few have realised the fatal disease is merely an inherited and myopic attitude that the English way is best.

Like Charybdis, the fearsome whirlpool of Greek mythology, our semi-permanent debate on the national team ends up going round in circles of self-delusion, our consistent demand for unrealistic success devouring all passing managers lured too close to the job.

This insular hara-kiri was evident off the field as well as on. Thousands of England fans pointedly ignored the Wembley announcer’s request to respect both national anthems by booing Croatia’s loudly, before revelling in taunting the traveling fans with several renditions of ‘You’re not singing anymore’, only to be confounded as supersub Mladen Petric speared a spectacular 25-yard winner with 13 minutes remaining.

‘Rule Britannia’ is still one of our favourite songs, but its boasting of global dominance had a particularly pathetic ring at Wembley last night, a specious self-aggrandizement amid the carnival of English obsolescence on the field.

Sheltering from the Wembley monsoon while the queues to the tube station still stretched down Bobby Moore Way a full hour after the final whistle, I got talking to some Croatian fans, who gave me some refreshing points of view on our particular malaise.

The heavens were downright miserable, but there was some blue-sky thinking to be found beneath the deluge.

“England has good players, but they don’t play as a team,” thought Branko from Dubrovnik.

“You’re right,” I said, “but we don’t know any different.” Contrary to some opinions aired this week, England can produce great talents.

I could reel off names such as Bobby Charlton, Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews, but from more recently, what about John Barnes, Paul Gascoigne, Gary Lineker and Chris Waddle from the 1980s and David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Owen and Rooney from the ‘90s.

“Your style is twenty years behind the times,” offered Zlatko from Mostar. “You hit long high balls to the big forward, Crouch. We know that is what the English do. It is simple to play against.”

“Well Crouch did score tonight,” I offered in defence, but I broadly agreed with his analysis.

“Look at the Germans,” said Goran from near Split. “They work hard the whole time too, but they do it as a team.”

I then racked my brains for times in my life when England have played with great fluidity and got stuck on a handful of occasions: In the latter stages of Italia ’90, for the first half of a friendly against Mexico in 2001, against Italy in Rome in 1997 and most famously smashing the Netherlands 4-1 at Wembley in Euro ’96 and Germany 5-1 in Munich five years later.

Our national style still leans towards passionate and direct attacking – ‘droit au but’ –‘straight to goal’, as the motto of Marseille says. And we have to change this mindset, wholesale, from the grass roots up, if we want to challenge for international trophies.

One final in 57 years of FIFA and UEFA competition is surely proof there is a hairline fracture in the monolith of the Football Association, a lingering faultline that cannot and should not be attributed to any particular coach or set of players.

The one excuse I didn’t hear on the tortuous journey from the Wembley mega-arena back to my home in North London was perhaps the most obvious one: Croatia were just better than us.

“Wake up,” Croatia coach Slaven Bilic said succinctly post-match. “We’re simply a better team.”

They undoubtedly were the superior side, having defeated England home and away in the qualification campaign, yet I still heard a fan moaning that England had played badly and lost to ‘a shit team’. ‘Yeah, they are a shit team,’ echoed his equally dim friend.

Well, relativism aside, any team who tops a UEFA qualification group cannot by any sound reasoning be made of caca.

The Croats gave England a footballing lesson in both Zagreb and London in soaking up pressure, throwing bodies into attack or defense appropriately, counter-attacking and shooting from distance.

But what really stood out for me at Wembley was their outfield players’ superior technique.

The Croats’ creed is possession, like it is for all great football nations, while England still go for broke in the final third and try to hit that killer ball into the channels or lump it onto the head of that big lad in the box, too often finding their optimistic punts intercepted or overhit instead.

On the night, Shaun-Wright Phillips typified what is wrong with English football. Energetic and brimming with passion, the Chelsea winger charged goalward whenever he was given the ball, but too often his ardour burned out as he mishit a cross, collided with a defender or ran the ball out of play.

Time and again, England played without any telepathy when they managed to get the ball near the opponents’ box, while every Croatian tap, layoff or backheel seemed to be wired to an incoming teammate.

The Croats clearly knew how to counter-attack better than we did, sprinting upfield, stretching our retreating defence and hitting first-time passes to runners without hesitation. They built a shape-shifting, multi-dimensional game which defeated our rigid, one-dimensional structure with ease.

We might lazily lump all Eastern European football nations together as tough, former communist, crack army sides from chilly lands, but remember Croatia, like Romania, is essentially a Mediterranean country whose warm weather breeds skilful ballplayers.

Facing Italy across the Adriatic, Croatia has only been a country since 1991 and with a population of under five million, has in that short space of time, produced stars of the calibre of Zvonimir Boban, Alen Boksic, Robert Prosinecki and Davor Suker.

Yet however you compare the two countries, England should be a far better football nation than Croatia.

Once again, I fear we will skirt around the answer to our ills – a complete and radical overhaul of the coaching culture.

The intangibility of the problem and its equally nebulous solution just discourage us from addressing it properly, and so England stumble to under-achievement every time.

It almost seems a treasonable offense to the Anglo-Saxon virtues ingrained in our national game to tell our kids to keep the ball instead of to ‘get it in there!’, to think about their shape and position instead of to ‘get stuck in lad!’ and to bring others into attack instead of to ‘go on your own, son, have a pop!’ etc.

The continental method does seem anathema to a windy Sunday morning league game in Rotherham, but ask yourself who is the more successful soccer nation – Italy or England?

‘Look at Arsenal,’ Zlatko continued. ‘They have a great coach and play in a European style but are an English team’.

Treating football seriously from a young age also draws us into a political debate we would rather steer clear of, that of mass education’s historic lack of importance in England in general.

If we want well trained footballers, we need well educated players, who understand the professional commitment and the intellectual ability the game demands at the highest level.

‘What about Wayne Rooney?’ you holler. Nothing can compensate for raw talent like his, surely; only to a point. Imagine what Gascoigne could have done with the self-discipline of a Zinedine Zidane, or how Rooney could prosper with the spatial awareness of strikers like Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry or Henrik Larsson.

On the train home, there was no anger, nor misery at England’s premature exit from Euro 2008, just a resigned mood, an unspoken acceptance that we have seen it all before.

I really felt that maybe for the first time, an accommodation of our ineptitude had begun to set in with the fans, a growing acceptance of the obvious mediocrity we have been dealing with for years.

Make no mistake. This umpteenth failure for England will not be the last, unless we do start again from the grass roots, bite the bullet and admit the FA’s manuals are mistaken in many ways and our coaching outdated.

Or, we can bury our heads in the sand once more, blame Steve McClaren or whoever underperformed last night and come 2010, summon up the blood to bellow from the rooftops our belief that England can win the World Cup, if only we the fans and they the players want it enough.

Unless there is a revolution, the future history of the England team writes itself.

All may not be lost however. As I traipsed down the many steps from Wembley’s upper tier, and some fans began to sing ‘Jose Mourinho’, I began to think that the foreign influx in our game could end up being the solution instead of the problem, whoever the next coach may be. The tide of the world game is all around us now, at home and abroad.

And what is for sure is that England’s national football culture, more than ever, is all played out.

(c) Sean O'Conor & Soccerphile

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Fifa World Rankings October 2007

Argentina are top of the Fifa World rankings followed by Brazil, Italy and France. England drop out of the top 10 after defeat to Russia in Euro 2008 qualifying.

Scotland are up to 13th only two places behind the "Auld Enemy"


1 Argentina
2 Brazil
3 Italy
4 France
5 Germany
6 Spain
7 Netherlands
8 Portugal
9 Czech Republic
10 Croatia
11 England
12 Romania
13 Scotland
14 Greece
15 Mexico
16 Russia
17 Uruguay
18 USA
19 Nigeria
20 Poland

Last month's FIFA Rankings

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Blatter U-turns on World Cup rotation

FIFA President Sepp Blatter has signalled that the policy of World Cup rotation is about to be ditched.

Speaking to the BBC, Blatter admitted he would welcome England bidding for 2018, a tournament which under the present model, should be held in North or Central America.

"I am advocating we open the market," said Blatter. Back in May, he described rotation as "a milestone", speaking to FIFA delegates in Zurich, while only a month ago, announced that a final decision on rotation with regard to 2018 would come at the end of October.

With 2010 going to (South) Africa and 2014 to South America (Brazil), Europe's next turn would not have been in 2018 (CONCACAF) but in 2022, a ridiculously long wait for that continent's front runner, England.

Given the concentration of money, power, media and fan interest in European football, it seems brave, or foolhardy, to award it the tournament only once every 24 years (there are six FIFA regions).

The traditional system of alternating from Europe to South America was ripe for reform with the global spread of the game and now Japan/Korea, South Africa and the USA have all hosted, or are about to host, the sport's showpiece event.

Outside of the traditional power bases, Australia and China could both mount serious bids before long, but political worries will probably keep the Islamic world, in the form of Morocco and Egypt, excluded for the foreseeable future. The USA is also determined to host the World Cup again after the success of 1994, the the swathe of impressive new American stadia and the arrival of David Beckham to MLS. Mexico, too, is interested in hosting its third World Cup.

It is therefore, unquestionably the world's cup, yet any change to the traditional Atlantic alteration should not be so rigid as FIFA's rotation system. Four years is a long time to wait and in a continent like Europe where England, Russia, Spain, Italy and Holland & Belgium are all itching to host the World Cup, a possible wait of half a century is too long for any country.

Rotation was never fully explained - does Oceania or CONCACAF has as much right to host the World Cup as Europe? , never universally accepted by the football world and was only rushed in as a response to Germany sensationally snatching the 2006 tournament from the heavily Blatter-endorsed South Africa by the narrowest of margins (Oceania's Charles Dempsey abstained on the final vote).

Brazil had a shoe-in for 2014 because South America had not hosted the event since Argentina in 1978.

Brazil and its decrepit stadia and infrastructure is far from ready to host the World Cup however, a fact which swayed Blatter to renege on one of his favourite pet policies.

After Colombia and Argentina withdrew, the one-horse race south of the equator illuminated a flaw in the rotation system if the only contender is manifestly unable to host the month-long show.

"We are not in a very comfortable situation in South America," admitted the FIFA President.

"It is better to have three or four associations trying to get the number one competition of the world."

Rumours abound that a new system will prevent only the previous two host regions from applying, reducing the minimum wait for any country to 12 years.

It should be remembered of course that the FIFA Executive committee and not Blatter ratifies policy and CONCACAF's controversial Jack Warner for one is against any change to the status quo.

However, the days of the half-baked, hasty and unconvincing rotation system are now clearly numbered.

(c) Sean O'Conor & Soccerphile



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Fifa World Rankings Sept 2007

Italy are top of the FIFA World Rankings followed by Argentina and Brazil. England are up to 9th place after two wins in Euro 2008 qualifying matches. Croatia, likely to top England's group, are 10th. Scotland rise to 14th after beating France (6th) in Paris.

1 Italy
2 Argentina
3 Brazil
4 Germany
5 Netherlands
6 France
7 Spain
8 Portugal
9 England
10 Croatia
11 Czech Republic
12 Romania
13 Mexico
14 Scotland
15 Greece
16 Poland
17 Ukraine
18 USA
19 Uruguay
20 Sweden

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Fifa World Rankings Aug 2007

Fifa World Rankings Aug 2007
Brazil are top of the FIFA World Rankings after beating Argentina in the Copa America 2007. Argentina are second, followed by Italy. England are down in 12th place below Euro 2008 qualifying opponents Croatia now up to 6th. Portugal are 10th.

1 Brazil
2 Argentina
3 Italy
4 France
5 Germany
6 Croatia
7 The Netherlands
8 Spain
9 Czech Republic
10 Portugal

11 Mexico
12 England
13 Romania
14 Greece
15 Ukraine
16 Cameroon
17 USA
18 Serbia
19 Sweden
20 Poland

Fifa World Rankings July 2007

Brazil are back on top of the FIFA World Rankings after beating Argentina in the Copa America 2007. Argentina rise to second, followed by Italy. England drop out of the top 10 and are down in 12th place below Euro 2008 qualifying opponents Croatia.

Fifa World Rankings June 2007

Fifa World Rankings June 2007
Italy stay top of the FIFA World Rankings. Brazil drop to third, Argentina move down to fifth below Germany. England are in 8th after a win in Euro 2008 qualifying.

1 Italy
2 Brazil
3 France
4 Germany
5 Argentina
6 Portugal
7 Spain
8 England
9 Netherlands
10 Czech Republic

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FiFA World Rankings May 2007

FiFA World Rankings May 2007
Italy stay top of the FIFA World Rankings. Brazil leapfrog Argentina to move in to second. England are in 8th after poor Euro 2008 qualifying results.

1 Italy
2 Brazil
3 Argentina
4 France
5 Germany
6 Netherlands
7 Portugal
8 England
9 Spain
10 Czech Republic



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Fifa World Rankings April 2007

Italy go back on top of the FIFA World Rankings, leap-frogging Agentina, on a day which could also see Italy confirmed as hosts of Euro 2012. England drop two places to 8th after poor results in Euro 2008 qualifying.

1 Italy
2 Argentina
3 Brazil
4 France
5 Germany
6 Netherlands
7 Portugal
8 England
9 Spain
10 Czech Republic
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FIFA World Rankings March 2007

Argentina are on top of the world!

World Champions Italy slip to second after only one month at the summit with Brazil now third.

England are 6th.

Japan move down one to 42nd position. South Korea drop four places to 48th position.

The USA are in 30th. Croatia stay in 12th after their good results in Euro 2008 qualifying. Scotland are up four spots to 16th position. Northern Ireland overtake the Republic of Ireland in the rankings.



1 Argentina
2 Italy
3 Brazil
4 France
5 Germany
6 England
7 The Netherlands
8 Portugal
9 Czech Republic
10 Spain




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FIFA World Rankings Feb 2007

After 55 months at the top Brazil are no longer number one! World Champions Italy are the first new number one since November 1993. England stay 6th despite a poor display in losing at home to Spain in a friendly at Old Trafford.

Japan move up to 41st position. South Korea jump to 44th position.

The USA are in 28th. Croatia are 12th after their good results in Euro 2008 qualifying. Scotland are up six spots to 20th position.



1 Italy
2 Brazil
3 Argentina
4 France
5 Germany
6 England
7 The Netherlands
8 Portugal
9 Czech Republic
10 Spain




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FIFA World Rankings Jan 2007

FIFA World Rankings Jan 2007
Brazil remain top, followed by Italy, Argentina and France. England are down to 6th, down one place as Germany leapfrog them into the top 5.

Big climbers are Vietnam.


1 Brazil
2 Italy
3 Argentina
4 France
5 Germany
6 England
7 Netherlands
8 Nigeria
9 Portugal
10 Czech Republic

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Fifa World Rankings Nov 2005

Fifa World Rankings November 2005

1 Brazil
2 Czech Republic
3 Netherlands
4 Argentina
5 France
6 Spain
7 Mexico
8 USA
9 England
10 Portugal

Source: FIFA.com

Fifa World Rankings November 2005

Fifa World Rankings Nov 2005

Fifa World Rankings November 2005

1 Brazil
2 Czech Republic
3 Netherlands
4 Argentina
5 France
6 Spain
7 Mexico
8 USA
9 England
10 Portugal

Source: FIFA.com