I'm doing research right now on the competitiveness of global competition. How competitive are the competitions countries encounter as they engage in world economics, development, and so forth?
I have been looking at soccer in particular, given that over 200 countries and territories play the sport and we have a World Cup Finals tournament coming up soon. I wondered what data told us about the competitiveness of the sport. Here are some thoughts.
First, over 200 nations and territories get to try out for the World Cup tournament. Participation is high.
Second, up to 2018, 78 nations would have actually qualified (out of this 200). So about 120 have not qualified.
Third, 28 nations have played in the quarterfinals of the World Cup tournament since 1978. That is 28 different nations filling 80 slots.
Fourth, and possibly most interesting, is that there is actually quite a lot of shifting and changing in the rankings of nations leading up to the World Cup. I looked at the December 2011 and March 2018 rankings of 193 countries and territories, and found that many of the nations actually saw significant changes in rankings because of their performance in world competition. I organized the nations into five leagues in 2011 and 2018 (on the basis of their percentile rank in both periods) and found that 53% of the countries shifted between leagues over this 7 year period (see the chart below, where the boxes show the nations that stayed in their 'leagues' over time and the dots outside the boxes show nations that broke out of the leagues by performing better--above the 45 degree line--or dropped into a lower league because they were not competitive enough).
It is interesting to me that--given these data--nations only have a 46% chance of being in the same league in seven years time. Nations have about a 25% chance of being in a higher league and 19% chance of being in a lower league. This kind of churning suggests competition is alive and well in world soccer.
The competitiveness is even evident in the top 'division' of world soccer, where the highest ranked teams can be found. Imagine that the nations currently ranked 5th and 6th (Belgium and Poland) were ranked outside of the top 20% in the world in 2011 (Belgium was ranked 41st out of about 190, or about 22%, and Poland was ranked 66th). Countries like Wales and Iceland have also fought their way into the top tier; countries like Ivory Coast and Japan and Greece have dropped out.
It is true that perennial powerhouses like Brazil and Germany and Argentina and Spain and Portugal and France are (mostly) always in the top tier. But they need to look out for new competitors every time they turn out to play. Because world soccer--at the national level--is actually a very competitive affair.
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