Three matches. Not a single goal scored; nine conceded. China’s men’s national team has slipped from 91st to 96th in the world rankings.
15th in Asia. Its lowest position in ten years.
A lot of people think the rankings are just a summary of results. They’re not. They record how far each match’s result deviates from expectations. FIFA changed the formula in 2018, borrowing from chess. It’s just one line: new rating equals old rating plus a weight multiplied by the actual result minus the expected result. The expected result is calculated from the gap between the two teams’ ratings; a 600-point difference means roughly a 70% chance of winning.
Win the games you’re expected to win, and you barely gain any points.
A 3–0 win over the Maldives at the end of September earned them practically nothing. Before the match, a win was already expected; they won, so the difference was close to zero. The ugly part came later. They lost to Palestine, whose ranking was lower than theirs to begin with. Their expected win probability was below 50%, so the loss maximized the negative difference. The final score was 0–5—the first time in the team’s history they had lost to this opponent.
Across the three international windows, they lost a total of 15.23 points. Their score fell from 1,254.81 to 1,241.9.
Here’s what stings even more. In the weighting table, friendlies are in the lowest tier: 10 points. The tier for World Cup matches from the quarter-finals onward is 60 points. In other words, those 15 points were lost in the cheapest possible window—not because someone thrashed them in a major tournament. Nobody pays attention to the day-to-day. The books still end up in the red.
The really crucial cutoff date isn’t last week. It’s December 15, in Kuala Lumpur. That’s when the Asian Football Confederation will hold the draw for the Asian qualifiers for the 2030 World Cup. Seeding will be based solely on the latest rankings available at the time. Based on the October rankings, China are in Pot 2.
Pot 2 or Pot 3. What’s the difference?
The difference is whether you can avoid the top pot. Teams like Japan, Iran and Australia are in there, along with South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Whoever you draw will be a tough opponent; there’s no choosing, and that part is true. China are currently 15th in Asia, with Bahrain, Vietnam and Tajikistan just behind them, all within a small points margin. If they can’t get results in their two November friendlies, and tumble out of Asia’s top 18, they’ll be in Pot 3. Same draw, different pot, completely different groups.
The most absurd part is that you can choose your opponents.
The host gets to decide who to invite to a friendly. That’s just how it works. Want to gain points? Arrange a match against a highly ranked team—and don’t lose. Want to play it safe? Just schedule fewer matches. Against a team like the Maldives, a win is as good as no win at all, while a loss can cost you dearly. Choosing your opponent is a math problem in itself.
The crypto world has an exact parallel. Fan tokens and prediction markets price the chances of “qualifying,” and one of the inputs to that price is this ranking score—which can be rewritten by two friendlies. People placing bets think they’re betting on how well eleven players will perform. In reality, they’re betting on the output of a formula, and one of the formula’s inputs is “who you play.”
But an on-chain ledger has no column for “expectation.” An automated market maker prices a token based only on how much remains on each side of the pool, not on what anyone thinks it ought to be worth. So it won’t give you points for inviting a weak team, or deduct points for losing to one. It only cares about balances.
November 14 against Malaysia and November 17 against Bahrain, both at Guangzhou’s Tianhe Stadium. Bahrain are currently 97th in the world and 16th in Asia, with barely any points between them and China. One match could be enough to leapfrog them. The importance of those two matches isn’t in what happens on the pitch. It’s in the envelope in December.
Whether they can earn enough points is anyone’s guess. I couldn’t find a match-by-match breakdown showing exactly how many points the Maldives game added; all I could confirm was the total deduction of 15.23 points across the three windows.
Next time you check the betting odds, take a look at the draw pots first. Which pot your team is in matters more than how many games it won last month.
$CHZ $BNB $BTC #国足 #世界杯预选赛 #FIFA Rankings
15th in Asia. Its lowest position in ten years.
A lot of people think the rankings are just a summary of results. They’re not. They record how far each match’s result deviates from expectations. FIFA changed the formula in 2018, borrowing from chess. It’s just one line: new rating equals old rating plus a weight multiplied by the actual result minus the expected result. The expected result is calculated from the gap between the two teams’ ratings; a 600-point difference means roughly a 70% chance of winning.
Win the games you’re expected to win, and you barely gain any points.
A 3–0 win over the Maldives at the end of September earned them practically nothing. Before the match, a win was already expected; they won, so the difference was close to zero. The ugly part came later. They lost to Palestine, whose ranking was lower than theirs to begin with. Their expected win probability was below 50%, so the loss maximized the negative difference. The final score was 0–5—the first time in the team’s history they had lost to this opponent.
Across the three international windows, they lost a total of 15.23 points. Their score fell from 1,254.81 to 1,241.9.
Here’s what stings even more. In the weighting table, friendlies are in the lowest tier: 10 points. The tier for World Cup matches from the quarter-finals onward is 60 points. In other words, those 15 points were lost in the cheapest possible window—not because someone thrashed them in a major tournament. Nobody pays attention to the day-to-day. The books still end up in the red.
The really crucial cutoff date isn’t last week. It’s December 15, in Kuala Lumpur. That’s when the Asian Football Confederation will hold the draw for the Asian qualifiers for the 2030 World Cup. Seeding will be based solely on the latest rankings available at the time. Based on the October rankings, China are in Pot 2.
Pot 2 or Pot 3. What’s the difference?
The difference is whether you can avoid the top pot. Teams like Japan, Iran and Australia are in there, along with South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Whoever you draw will be a tough opponent; there’s no choosing, and that part is true. China are currently 15th in Asia, with Bahrain, Vietnam and Tajikistan just behind them, all within a small points margin. If they can’t get results in their two November friendlies, and tumble out of Asia’s top 18, they’ll be in Pot 3. Same draw, different pot, completely different groups.
The most absurd part is that you can choose your opponents.
The host gets to decide who to invite to a friendly. That’s just how it works. Want to gain points? Arrange a match against a highly ranked team—and don’t lose. Want to play it safe? Just schedule fewer matches. Against a team like the Maldives, a win is as good as no win at all, while a loss can cost you dearly. Choosing your opponent is a math problem in itself.
The crypto world has an exact parallel. Fan tokens and prediction markets price the chances of “qualifying,” and one of the inputs to that price is this ranking score—which can be rewritten by two friendlies. People placing bets think they’re betting on how well eleven players will perform. In reality, they’re betting on the output of a formula, and one of the formula’s inputs is “who you play.”
But an on-chain ledger has no column for “expectation.” An automated market maker prices a token based only on how much remains on each side of the pool, not on what anyone thinks it ought to be worth. So it won’t give you points for inviting a weak team, or deduct points for losing to one. It only cares about balances.
November 14 against Malaysia and November 17 against Bahrain, both at Guangzhou’s Tianhe Stadium. Bahrain are currently 97th in the world and 16th in Asia, with barely any points between them and China. One match could be enough to leapfrog them. The importance of those two matches isn’t in what happens on the pitch. It’s in the envelope in December.
Whether they can earn enough points is anyone’s guess. I couldn’t find a match-by-match breakdown showing exactly how many points the Maldives game added; all I could confirm was the total deduction of 15.23 points across the three windows.
Next time you check the betting odds, take a look at the draw pots first. Which pot your team is in matters more than how many games it won last month.
$CHZ $BNB $BTC #国足 #世界杯预选赛 #FIFA Rankings