We are ranked 3rd because we are consistent? Is that consistent in getting knocked out in the quarter finals of major competitions? People keep saying that we are good at qualifying but we didn´t qualify for the euros in 2008 and we only just qualified for the World Cup in 2002 thanks to Beckham scoring a memorable freekick in the last minute. Countries like Spain, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, France, Portugal, Italy...etc all consistently qualify for the major competitions ,as expected, and almost all of them do much better than us, so I don´t agree that we should be ranked 3rd, ahead of many of those teams.
Read the explanation I posted. It conclusively explains why England are 3rd, there's no arguing with it. Unless, of course, you could suggest a better system?
For a start the rankings only go back 4 years, so our poor performances under McClaren have been expunged. Also, if you look at teams like Argentina, France, Italy and Portugal's qualifying records for the last few tournaments, they are a lot worse than ours (e.g. I think the rankings still include Argentina getting beaten 6-2 by Bolivia, and the other poor results they got under Maradonna). Brazil are going to slide a lot futher down the rankings before the world cup, because they will have gone three years without a competitive match. Joe's earlier post neatly identifies the, rather large, problems with this ranking system. To be fair, the only reason it's there is for world cup seeding purposes. The less attention that gets paid to it the better.
If the system they use states we are the 3rd best then, in my opinion, they need a new system. They should base it a whole lot more on how teams do in the major competitions.
It includes all their games, qualifiers and friendlies as well, but the less important games get less points (I think). It's a really complicated system, and when you really think about it, it really does have to be complicated to be fair, and it's very difficult to come up with an alternative.
Qualifiers are competitive matches and should have some importance but I don´t think it´s OK that a team should get lots of points for qualifying, however brilliantly they do it, and then don´t well in the major tournament and get eliminated early on. As for friendlies, they shouldn't even come into context when ranking teams.
