Guyana moves up in FIFA rankings
By Steve Ninvalle
Stabroek News
March 18, 2004
Dispite a miserable run in the World Cup qualifiers Guyana was able to limp ahead in the latest rankings released by world governing football body FIFA.
In its March ratings FIFA have placed Guyana at 179, six places ahead of the 185 position the Land of Many Waters held down last month.
The forward movement is complements of a 2-0 victory over sister CARICOM state Barbados in a friendly international last month. Neil Hernandez and Gregory `Jackie Chan' Richardson netted for Guyana.
The game was a warm up for action in the World Cup Qualifiers.
Guyana is now tied with Samoa. The last time Guyana occupied the 179th position was October last year. Following the win over Barbados, Guyana was humbled 5-0 by host Grenada in the first match of a home and away tie of the CONCACAF World Cup Qulifier.
In the return game at the Blairmont ground last Sunday the Grenadians brushed aside the homsters 3-1 to earn a place against the USA in the next round.
Guyana's highest FIFA ranking was 134, which was acheived in August of 1993. The lowest is 185. Meanwhile, Barbados has dropped two places to 113 while Grenada moved up four places to 151. Mexico is the highest ranked CONCACAF member coming in at number 5 while Jamaica is the highest ranked Caribbean team with a position of 48.
In August 1993 FIFA, in colaboration with the Coca-Cola Company, introduced the ranking system for senior national teams. Not included are matches played by junior teams or other representative national sides (such as the women's national team).
FIFA website state that the system makes it possible to publish comparisons of the relative strengths of internationally active teams at regular intervals.
The ranking list is produced by a computer program which assigns a team points for every match, according to clearly defined criteria. The factors taken into consideration are: Winning, drawing and losing, number of goals, home or away match, importance of the match (multiplication factor) and regional strength (multiplication factor).
For each team only the seven best results per year are given full weighting. Results from the past are given progressively less weighting year by year until after eight years they are dropped completely. In this way current success is rated more highly than past results, the FIFA website stated.