Most of these per-capita measures are bullshit... which doesn't stop people from trotting them out to "prove" whatever point they want to make. A more correct analysis would be beyond the mathematical comprehension of the masses, I'm afraid.
Amateur - I started thinking about all the ways in which these numbers were statistically meaningless and about what you would have to do to give them something worth looking at, but then I thought that maybe, for all that jiggery pokery, you'd end up getting pretty similar results in terms of the overall ranking. Still, at least it facilitated the use of the expression "jiggery pokery".
Nothing like a little jiggery pokery with hard numbers. The six most populated countries fill out the bottom six slots. Given this, my general apprehension of statistical studies, and the fact that I am American, I am dismissing this study as, uh, flibberty-gibberty.
Yeah, Brazil sucks at football. See!
Largely meaningless "statistics" given that the largest nation is 300 times bigger than the smallest in terms of population but there weren't 300 times more FIFA points available.
I think this study was conducted by the same dudes who did the racial bias study on NBA refs. Neither one makes any sense.
Most of these per-capita measures are bullshit... The same could be said of the FIFA rankings ... making this measure a double dose, or perhaps bullshit squared.
"jiggery pokery" That some kind of British porn?
There are only 5,000,0000 Scots? There are 84,000,000 Germans, but only 40,000,000 Spaniards? I like lists.
I like lists. Top 5 Weeds:Weedy McSmokeyMary JaneGoldenrodPoison IvyKudzu (it kind of grows on you)
Well I wouldn't expect the USA to score very high on that list. Soccer has to compete with a lot of other sports for players. Also, due to the weird fact that the universities, colleges, high schools and other academic sports programs refuse to be part of FIFA's American affiliate, the USSF, you have a lot of players out there who don't get counted in the official statistics.
