Football: Indian National Team news ...

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srini
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by srini »

prasen9 wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 4:02 pm Weighting it by the sports' popularity is not unbiased. It is biased wrt popularity.

If the objective is winning medals, then going by the rule that exists is fine.
Completely agree but what are our chances of winning a medal in ambo, pencak silat, kurash or sepak takraw? If we stood at 7th or 8th position in these sports in the last edition, its likely we stand at similar position in these games with the host nation bagging medals in most of those unheard sports. I am gonna specifically watch out for our medal count in these sports when games conclude on September 2nd.

I think the real reason this rule allowing upto 8th place was kept is to give our Big WORMS sitting at helm of our sports affairs some space for their manoeuvres in playing their dirty little politics.How else do they keep their chair at helm if the rule were to allow only up to 5th position which stand any realistic chance of medal ?
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by prasen9 »

srini, agree fully. I am fine with having a better criteria for medal-worthiness if you really care about that. For example, if there were only eight teams and we came eighth by a long margin, that team should not be sent using this rule. The number of countries participating should be taken into account and that will be an objective way to help popular sports. Because 8/8 and 8/32 is not the same. And, like I said, I agree with your basic premise that the football team should be sent.
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

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suresh wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 11:55 pm Welcome back kujo.
thank you Suresh!! what did I miss ? :-)
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by jaydeep »

kujo wrote: Tue Jul 10, 2018 3:29 pm
suresh wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 11:55 pm Welcome back kujo.
thank you Suresh!! what did I miss ? :-)
We missed your analytical mind. :D
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by suresh »

Absolutely right, Jaydeep. That is what I was thinking about when I welcomed Kujo back.
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by kujo »

thanks Suresh and Jaydeep!! you both are too kind.

Good to be back... :-)
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by jayakris »

kujo wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 9:50 pm We also have a different document from FIFA website that reduce the "I" "Importance of matches" value by a factor of 10! Not sure which one is the latest??... https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload ... 3v3vy0aqo1
And then FIFA has this problem to address: https://twitter.com/We_Global/status/10 ... 7403971584
and also from an article: http://www.weglobalfootball.com/2018/06 ... -rankings/ --
Because there is no multiplier like in the real ELO Rankings, the amount of points teams can earn in a match are mitigated. Because points are mitigated, it makes it that much harder for teams to move up and down the standings. Teams are going to be picking up 5-10 points frequently in matches. There’s a 750 point gap between #1 and #28. Slovakia would have to beat Germany 20 times in a row just to pass them in the rankings. And that’s just if it’s a World Cup Qualifier. If it’s in friendlies, Slovakia would have to beat Germany 50 times to pass them.
Well, I have had many of these questions in my mind for the last month and have been waiting for July 19th for the new rankings to come out. July 19th came and went, and there is no sign of any new rankings from FIFA like they have been promising at the FIFA ranking schedule page... Maybe they rushed the approval of this and is only now asking the questions that we were all asking already? It is crazy, if so.

I saw an article that said that Korea might move up all the way to 25th for beating #1 Germany and that Germany may fall to 7th for just that loss. Now, that had implications on some Korean guy being given work permit in UK to play in the EPL (which is based on the home country's rankings - an absolutely asinine-sounding rule by the piddly island country, by the way!). There are other players in similar situations. I mean, some serious stuff rides on the FIFA ranks, and we still don't know what the hell they are planning, a day after the date of the supposed revealing of the new rankings.
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by jayakris »

Still no news on the FIFA rankings.... Meanwhile, here is a report that they have delayed it to August. I think they finally see that the shift to the ELO type rankings aren't as easy as they thought.

I saw somewhere that the old rankings will actually show France to be #2 and the new rankings will show them as #4 (based on some assumptions on how FIFA will implement it). Stuff like that will get criticized, though I think it is shortsighted, and ELO is ultimately a better scheme. But some proper corrections are needed on ELO, and what we have seen so far do not seem to be the right fixes on ELO.
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by jayakris »

A big match coming up for India, expected to be in October! -- India to play friendly against China

Meanwhile, a Chak De style movie is also coming out this year! -- British actor Darren Tassell to play Indian football coach Stephen Constantine in a movie
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by jayakris »

The new rankings came out today. Phew, we didn't drop or anything. Actually we moved up a bit to #96, which I believe ties our all-time highest ranking. So, the starting point in the ELO-based rankings from now on, is a good one for us. We are probably over-ranked a bit too -- but we will take that. Trying hard not to drop is better than trying hard to climb up from a lower point.

If we had stuck to the previous system, we would have dropped 3-4 spots to around #104 or so, by my estimate a couple of months ago after the intercontinental cup. If we those matches went by ELO, I believe we would have probably dropped a bit too, as we didn't beat New Zealand. But we got lucky because FIFA seems to have gone with the June rankings to set the starting points on ELO (something like that), and the main changes are only with the world cup teams. I haven't been able to determine exactly what FIFA did, but either way, we ended up just fine!

kujo, are you around to take a look at what FIFA did and how they set up the starting points for the new ELO-based ranking system?
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by kujo »

jayakris wrote: Fri Aug 17, 2018 1:34 am kujo, are you around to take a look at what FIFA did and how they set up the starting points for the new ELO-based ranking system?
Just saw this message. Oh sure, will take a look at it....
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by jayakris »

Thanks kujo. They did something like re-scaling the points in the June old-rankings to get the starting points (the new minimum is 868 for the bottom-most teams, while it was 0 before. Not sure where the 868 comes from; about half of the highest points in June), and then calculating with the new formulas. Not sure if they added in all the friendlies that were played just before the world cup, but after the June rankings. I would have expected a few more of the rankings to change by 2 or 3 spots here and there, if they did -- but hardly any non-world cup team's rank-order changed much. They don't seem to have used the old system to add in the pre-world-cup friendlies like our continental cup, while finding the starting points in the new system (if they did, India would have dropped at least 4 or 5 spots)
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by srini »

I am gonna specifically watch out for our medal count in these sports when games conclude on September 2nd.

I am happy india is assured of at least bronze by making it to last 4 in Sepal takraw im above sports
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by jayakris »

jayakris wrote: Mon Aug 20, 2018 3:09 pm Thanks kujo. They did something like re-scaling the points in the June old-rankings to get the starting points (the new minimum is 868 for the bottom-most teams, while it was 0 before. Not sure where the 868 comes from; about half of the highest points in June), and then calculating with the new formulas. Not sure if they added in all the friendlies that were played just before the world cup, but after the June rankings.
Okay, found the FIFA document - https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload ... tjwf8qecba

It says, "The points for seeding were calculated: Pseeding= 1600 - (R – 1) * 4" and gives the examples: "Pseeding for team with R= 1 is 1600; Pseeding for team with R = 3 is 1592; Pseeding for team with R = 100 is 1204; Pseeding for team with R = 200 is 804"

Here R is the ranks from the June rankings. They also say - "it was important to transition smoothly from the previous FWR to the new one. For the initial seeding of teams in the new FWR, teams were evenly distributed over a range of approximately 800 to 1600 points" and add a footnote that the "upper value corresponds to approximate points total of best ranked team in previous FWR in June 2018 (e.g. Germany = 1558 points)"

So, what FIFA decided was to not use the June points themselves, but to give starting points according to the earlier rankings, in a linear scale, which they called "evenly spreading". Hmmm... That's interesting.

Wikipedia says, "FIFA had intended to introduce the new ranking system in July 2018, but with no matches scheduled between the July and August ranking dates, delayed until August 2018. There was speculation from football journalists such as ESPN's Dale Johnson that this was because projections of the new rankings had seen relatively little change in positions". I think this is correct. I had seen others speculating that using the earlier points might be a problem. So they simply used a linear scale, and spread the points as per the rankings themselves.

So roughly it should give 4 extra points for every spot in the ranking.... A little weird, but maybe okay... but then again, wait..

That still didn't tell me from where exactly the 868 minimum points in the scale came. But wikipedia says - "FIFA had originally planned to use existing world ranking points from June 2018 as the start value, but when the August rankings appeared, the starting points had been changed to an equal distribution of points between 1600 (Germany, as the previously top ranked team) and 868, the total of those teams which had previously had 0 points".

But what wikipedia says about the number 868 doesn't make make any sense! I am working on figuring this out... I think I am close.
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Re: Football: Indian National Team news ...

Post by jayakris »

I had to rack my brains for a while to figure out what they did to get that number, 868. I think I just figured out what it was. The little hint was an unimportant-sounding note at the FIFA page that said, "The previous ranking table was converted into a new table without displacement in the order of the teams; i.e. each team retained its relative rank position. In instances where teams shared the identical rank (R), the teams which followed were given the next immediate rank possible. Example : If there were two teams in position no. 11, they both got R = 11, and the following team got R = 12 (instead of R =13)"... Sounded like mumbo-jumbo, but...

They were basically taking note of the fact that having tied teams (essentially of equal quality) ahead of any team, should not cause an extra drop of 4 points for a team! In other words, if there are only X "quality levels" in the ranks list, there should only be that many levels of Pseed values too. Sounds reasonable in logic, somewhat... (except that FIFA was lazy and did not correct for the fact that they were always rounding UP the earlier points rather than rounding to the closest integer, so they actually had teams as close as 0.2 in points not be tied and some pairs as much as 0.9 different being tied. But I will let their laziness go).

So, I then looked for how many ties there were in the June rankings. 50 teams were in 23 tied ranking spots in June (i.e., 44 teams at 22 ranking spots and then 6 teams in the final zero-point spot of #206, out of 211 teams). That tells us that there were 184 "quality levels" in the rank list (because 211-50+23 = 184). That means, the lowest level needed to be 183 spots below Germany in June. So, if Germany was given 1600 points, then, the lowest level (the six zero-pointer teams) would get 1600 - (184-1)*4 = 868 points. Viola!! .... Cross-checking, it seems that fits perfectly with the points they show for all the teams that didn't play anything significant since June.

Phew. Now, I feel like I have solved one of the greatest mysteries of the world since dinosaurs disappeared.

But do we agree with points being in somewhat of a linear scale from the top to bottom, in the starting seed points list. I am not an expert on ELO to say if that is normal in ELO football rankings. Did the earlier independent ELO rank lists show a somewhat linear trend from the top rank to the bottom rank? Is it fair to do this? Yes, it worked for FIFA to save their behinds and produce a rank list that preserved the earlier ranks and caused reasonable changes at the top after world cup. But what about going forward? Won't this screw things up in ELO? Experts, please chime in...
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