How Strong Are Soccer Teams? The “Host Paradox” and Other Counterintuitive Properties of FIFA’s Former Ranking System

Marek M. Kaminski
Additional contact information
Marek M. Kaminski: Department of Political Science and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697, USA

Games, 2022, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-22

Abstract: I investigate the paradoxes associated with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) point-based ranking of national soccer teams. The ranking has been plagued with paradoxes that incentivize teams to avoid playing friendly matches, i.e., matches that are not part of any official FIFA tournament or preliminaries, and applying other counterintuitive strategies. The most spectacular paradox was the dramatic underrating of the hosts of major tournaments. For a long time, host teams, which were absent from preliminary matches, would play only friendly matches that awarded few points. Here, I present three models that estimate the magnitude of the resulting “host effect” at 14.2–16 positions. Such an estimate counteracts the intuition that a large investment in hosting a tournament should result in an improvement in the host team’s standing. However, as discussed here, a given host’s low ranking could decrease interest in the tournament, and likely result in a major loss of advertisement revenue.

Keywords: football; soccer; FIFA ranking; social choice paradoxes; point systems; host paradox; World Cup (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/13/2/22/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/13/2/22/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jgames:v:13:y:2022:i:2:p:22-:d:763597

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().