Over and Underachieving Countries in European Soccer

An interesting thing to look at, I thought, was to see how international football teams perform when measured against how they would be expected to perform based on the nations' demographic, economic, climatic, and cultural variables.

First, here is how the teams are rated based on the average score of the past 15 months in FIFA Rankings:

(blue is better, red is worse)

Now, no surprises there - generally, the big countries in the West are strong, the smaller ones in the East are weak.

I created a simple model that predicts how good a country would be based on the previously mentioned factors, including population, GDP (PPP) per capita, number of days of sunshine in a year, the quality and popularity of domestic league football and others.

Here’s what the teams' expected ratings are:

The expected ratings are largely driven by the strength of the domestic leagues.

Obviously, the super-leagues in England, Spain, and Germany would be difficult to match by the respective international teams. The big-money leagues in Russia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan fit the same bill. On the other side, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland are engulfed by the league in England, where all their best players play. A similar situation occurs with Iceland and Scandinavia.

However, the predictive model includes variables other than the league quality:

Clearly, England should be the best team in Europe. The other big underachievers are minnows Moldova, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, and San Marino. Besides the aforementioned Wales and Northern Ireland, the biggest overachievers are World Champions France, Andorra, Sweden, Montenegro, and Croatia.

And, this is what the difference between expected and real ratings on a map look like: (blue is overachieving, red is underachieving)