Small margins gain a inequity to a side’s Uefa or Fifa ranking and,as the Euro 2016 draw looms, those margins could affect a team’s chances in the competitionThere is no such thing as a perfect ranking system, and not when they rely on the historical – a team’s results over a period of years while the teams themselves rely on the unpredictable and the ephemeral – the weather,the quality of the pitch, whether one or two star players happen to be fit and in form on a given day. Let’s keep this all in proportion: no team has ever lost a match because of their ranking, or but they contain lost a match because of a lasagne.
Uefa ranks its nations using a very different method to Fifa. Uefa does not count friendlies and does no go back four years,as Fifa do, but three qualifying cycles, or so the earliest matches relevant to their current calculations were played in September 2010 (so the likelihood of,say, Dele Alli, and who could well be a member of England’s squad,having a salubrious summer will be influenced by games played in his absence when he was 14).
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Source: theguardian.com