The World Cup is over -- let the real dog days of summer commence. Before the tournament fades into the mists of time, though, I thought it might be fun to update a previous post.
I said in that post that teams from Concacaf -- the region that encompasses North America, Central America and the Caribbean -- did more with their places in the World Cup than their African or Asian counterparts and thus did not deserve to have World Cup bids taken from them and given to other regions. The events of this year's World Cup did little to shake my confidence in that assertion. Four Concacaf teams qualified for Brazil, with three advancing out of their group and one reaching the quarterfinals. Just two of Africa's five teams reached the last 16, and Asia's four qualifiers combined for a paltry three points between them.
Below are my updated numbers for each region, both for this year's tournament and overall since the World Cup expanded to 32 teams in 1998. As a reminder, in an attempt to quantify how much return each region provides for each place it gets at world soccer's biggest event, I added up the points earned by each team from each region during the group stage and divided that total by the number of berths that region received. The idea is that trends in performance should emerge over the span of several World Cups. You can find the breakdown for 1998 through 2010 at the first link.
I said in that post that teams from Concacaf -- the region that encompasses North America, Central America and the Caribbean -- did more with their places in the World Cup than their African or Asian counterparts and thus did not deserve to have World Cup bids taken from them and given to other regions. The events of this year's World Cup did little to shake my confidence in that assertion. Four Concacaf teams qualified for Brazil, with three advancing out of their group and one reaching the quarterfinals. Just two of Africa's five teams reached the last 16, and Asia's four qualifiers combined for a paltry three points between them.
Below are my updated numbers for each region, both for this year's tournament and overall since the World Cup expanded to 32 teams in 1998. As a reminder, in an attempt to quantify how much return each region provides for each place it gets at world soccer's biggest event, I added up the points earned by each team from each region during the group stage and divided that total by the number of berths that region received. The idea is that trends in performance should emerge over the span of several World Cups. You can find the breakdown for 1998 through 2010 at the first link.
