Contributed by: Brett Northey Wednesday, February 25 2009 @ 11:45 pm ACDT
After a series of articles the final worldfootynews.com unofficial World Rankings for 2008 have been compiled. The list is a result of voting from six of our writers and taking into account discussion in the articles leading up to the vote. We're well aware that no system can be perfect, especially given arguments on issues such as whether to consider professional players (Australian, Irish), where to rank entities not necessarily widely acknowledged as countries (Catalonia versus Spain, the Peace Team), and whether to consider the best side a nation might put forward or just who was available, not to mention the lack of international matches and vagaries of the IC08 pool system. Nevertheless, it would seem to be a worthwhile outcome to be able to look back on the most recently completely year and to be able to point fans, players and people new to international footy at a table that is a reasonable attempt to rank the world's Australian football playing nations. Here is that list:
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There haven't been many changes since the previous discussions, with the exception the major exception being a late decision to list Catalonia as distinct from Spain, based primarily on the fact that they currently compete as such and the distinctly Spanish entity has not competed recently and as far as we know had also operated independently of Catalan players. That decision is subject to change for future rankings. Great Britain was elevated to an exact tie with Japan for 9th place.
We determined 22 teams fit the criteria, up from 17 two years earlier. The new teams added since our 2006 list are Croatia, the Peace Team, Finland, Catalonia, China and India. The only country lapsing is Spain - hopefully we'll see them return soon.
The biggest movers were Nauru (up from 12th to 6th), the US (down from 4th to 8th) and Denmark (perhaps unluckily down from 7th to 12th).
A World Rankings link will soon be added to our Resources section (a link added to the pulldown menu above).
Caveats