Rankings, seedings & the affect of friedlies

With the draw tomorrow, and stuck in the gaf all day today with the poxy weather... I got thinking...

What are the negative affects of playing friendlies? and how does it affect our rankings / seeding?

Given that not only the playoffs are seeded, the World Cup pots are now too for the first time. So it looks like no more groups death! ...As it stands we would be in pot 3 team in the finals should we qualify.

So in short, without boring everyone with pages of calculations

• If we hadnt played any friendlies this year, we'd be 121.37 points better off. This would place us in 20th JUST behind Denmark in 19th. So we would still be unseeded for the draw.

• If we hadnt played any friendlies this year AND last year, we'd be 182.13 points better off. This would push us up to 17th. So we would have been seeded AND if we reach the World Cup finals, placed in POT 2.

Some might argue playing friendlies are necessary to blood younger players and try new tactics etc.. (We never do either of those things) but not only losing friendlies damage rankings, drawing and even WINNING does them does too.

• Playing Oman for example last year and spanking them 4-0 actually made us drop down 1 whole place in the rankings!

• Playing them 3 times in 3 years caused us 2 places despite battering them in all 3 games!
  

• Nevermind playing AND losing to sides like Belarus.

• Then you look at games against Netherlands and Switzerland where we drew against decent opposition who are ranked well ahead of us and again it negatively affected our rankings.

Now all this might go out the window with the Nations League next year. Its not yet confirmed how it'll be weighed and not clear if we'll still have the odd friendly BUT in general its typical shortsightedness from the FAI and management here, playing a ridiculous amount of friendlies. Delaney even being on record as of last month saying he doesn't know where we stand with seeding!

We should always look to make it easier on ourselves instead of a quick cash grab.

With a bit of thought, we could be looking forward to drawing Greece, N.Ireland, Sweden or Denmark tomorrow and avoiding Italy and Croatia altogether.

 

Edited by valo88 - 17 Oct 2017 at 12:12am

Not this time it's based on rankings so OP is correct they gave got rid of geographic pots. Sorry to correct the corrector :-)

Edited by Baldrick - 17 Oct 2017 at 6:33am

Same geographical rules apply so for European teams net result is almost the same.

I think friendlies are necessary to blood in new players and try different formations.