QuoteAs Backstothewall said we need this campaign to improve our world rankings. We're currently 28th in the FIFA rankings for UEFA teams and getting to 24th would see us as second seeds for the WC draw in December.Originally Posted by samhaydenjr
Absolutely no
Our confidence is in the jacks and we need to get out of that particular toilet by winning football matches
As Backstothewall said we need this campaign to improve our world rankings. We're currently 28th in the FIFA rankings for UEFA teams and getting to 24th would see us as second seeds for the WC draw in December.
I wanted to try to estimate what a par performance looks like a bit more objectively.
Eloratings.net has the following ratings.
England 2015
Greece 1729
Finland 1641
Ireland 1608
This gives England an expected score of 0.922849107 against us, meaning we'd win about one game (or draw 2) in 12.
Greece comes in at 0.664034751, meaning we'd get about 4 wins in 12, or substitute two draws for each win for any combo you like.
Finland's expected score is 0.545975590, meaning we'd get about 5 wins and a draw out of 12. Again, sub two draws for each of any amount of wins you like.
Over the six games, we have an expected score of 2*(3-0.922849107-0.664034751-0.545975590) = 1.734281104. So two wins or a win and two draws is a hair above par. None of that considers home vs away, or the effects of evolving squads or new managers or any of that, just results to date, so it's far from perfect, but anyone assuming we're definitely going to take 8 or 10 points off of Greece or Finland is pretty much saying that Kenny was an absolutely diabolical manager. Now, average is just average. We can get lucky. We can also get better and make our own luck. I'm certainly hopeful of better than 4-6 points, but that's what the statistics say we should expect.
The inescapable factor was the absolutely diabolical manager's absolutely diabolical results. Dropping 24 FIFA places while the majority of fans (80%-plus betimes) celebrated the historic experience? You're right about making our own luck.
For comparison, we were exactly the same rating as Greece - 1729 - when Kenny took over. If you rerun the calculations I made above using that as our rating, our expected score rises to 2*(3 - 0.841586596 - 0.5 - 0.379041166) = 2.558744476, so an extra 0.824463372: about an extra draw or slightly more likely an extra win. The most likey outcome of 4-6 points becomes more like 6-7 points. (Elo ratings and 3 points for a win are a clunky match.) Form and luck are definitely going to be factors in how the group plays out: the teams that aren't England just aren't all that different in terms of quality.
What?
Folding my way into the big money!!!
Elo ratings are a system based on statistics. The difference between the ratings of two teams can be mapped to the average score you'd get if the two teams played many times. The ratings track results. If you ever saw The Social Network, the formula Zuckerberg wrote on the window - the one he based facematch or whatever he called the hotornot style website he made - is the one underpinning Elo ratings. A Hungarian mathematician called Arpad Elo did the hard work on this a long time back. I'm mostly familiar with them from chess, but there's a site that tracks them for men's national football teams.
The results from that say that we're the worst team in the group, but the gaps to Finland and Greece aren't unsurmountable. And as I said, it only considers results, so home advantage, form, injuries, managerial genius, luck, player development and decline, all of that gets averaged into a single number.
The point of Elo ratings is that you can work out how likely you are - in the long run - to beat a team based on the ratings gap between the two teams.
If we're 125 points outrated, we should expect to win one game in three, and lose the other two. (Or some combination of wins/draws/losses which equates to a 33% success rate) 200 points = 1 win in 4, 300 points = 1 win in 6, 400 points = 1 win in 10. Two teams rated the same should score 50% against each other (which stands to reason)
John probably didn't quite need to go to nine decimal places, the the idea is the same - working out what the ratings gap tells us what we should expect to score. The 0.5 in the middle of the brackets is the two games against Greece - we should expect to draw both those (or win one/lose one) because the assumption here is we're the same rating as Greece. Two draws or one win/one defeat are the same for Elo (50%) but give different points, which makes the comparison a bit awkward, as John notes.
Anything better than that would reflect a good campaign.
Just to note, that calculation - assuming we're the same as Greece - is based on the rating at the end of McCarthy 2. After Kenny, the expected results are lower, which calculation is in my earlier post.
And yes, ignore the umpteen decimal places. I was just copying/pasting from the calculator so as not to lose precision. You can round to 2 decimal places and consider it a percentage for any reasonable human interpretation.
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