As an English fan of the beautiful game I’ve long heard the ‘truism’ that England have underachieved in international football. If you’re from these parts I’m sure you’ve heard it before: “we invented the game and we’ve got the best league in the world. We should have won a few tournaments by now!”. Though probably said a little more bombastically than that.

But I’ve always wondered if it’s actually true. Should our national team be better at football? Should they have won more, or at least got to more semi-finals and finals? Who knows, it could be that they should be doing worse than they do.

And likewise beyond our shores and across the world, which country’s actual performance over the years matches what’s expected of them? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could definitively identify both serial underachievers and those who have performed better than they ought to.

To do this I’d need to find a formula that explained the performances to date of selected countries on the world stage. In essence, a set of common factors that lead to international success. I would then score the teams in each category with aim of matching them to their performances.

Then taking an average of all teams, I could assign a wide corridor of expectation in which each country would neatly fall. If any country’s real-life historical performances still fell outside this zone of expected performance, they would be deemed the over- or underachievers we’re looking for. As a bonus, it might even hint at which underachiever is due a big one in the future.

What resulted was a model that brought together multiple contributing factors, scoring systems and historical data to chart the performances.

When it came to the data, I aimed to find reliable sources to feed into the model. At times, however, objective information was not available and so a dash of interpretation was necessary; this was kept as dispassionate as possible. So this model may not attain the highest levels of scientific rigour, but think of it rather as an approximation, a fun take on what I suspect is the age-old topic of debate among many football fans around the world.

Visual shorthand

To illustrate the information and easily spot the patterns, I realised data visualisation was the key (I would say that, I am a designer after all!). I could place each nation on a bar chart in the order the model predicts them to be. If actual performance was measured by the height of each bar, the towers would make a descending line down to the bottom of the chart – and the prediction would be correct. Not that the bars had to sit exactly in order, just so long as each nation fell within its margin of error. Any significant drops or peaks in height relative to their neighbours would then highlight the outliers, the exceptions that prove the rule.

Scope

First, the bounds of this exercise. I decided to limit the scope to World Cup tournaments only. I was aware that omitting continental and other international tournaments would give me an incomplete picture and therefore skew the results. But the cadence, data and particular circumstances of these different tournaments are so disparate that a watertight comparison could not be made between them.

Limiting it to a quadrennial tournament also meant I had to ensure my corridor of expectation was wide enough to accommodate its infrequency. As the World Cup is staged only every four years, we could see a sudden darting ahead and falling behind of various teams the moment they perform or underperform at a particular tournament, throwing teams wildly – and misleadingly – out of their expected position.

The scope was also limited to the men’s game, which has a much longer history and larger dataset than the women’s. Essentially, the longer a nation has been at it, the more established their structures, recruitment, funding and footballing consciousness. It also means more tournaments racked up in which they’ve been able to develop and hone their abilities, allowing them to perform to their full potential as a nation.

In 2023, women’s overall results are still too skewed in favour of early pioneers, and that may be for some time to come.

Factors

Next up were the common factors, the logic that drives the whole model. I started with some obvious angles relating to wealth, health and population size. An enduring football tradition ingrained in a nation’s psyche was a prerequisite too. And then I added a couple of unconventional perspectives into the mix.

I also ruled some factors out. For example, the strength of domestic leagues, because too many successful international players – particularly in recent years – have plied their trade outside of their home country.

There were also a few that didn’t play out as expected when real data was applied: the early establishment of a country’s football association, the level of opposition a team qualifies against, and the number of tournament slots available in a particular football confederation. All threw up too many anomalies to fit the overall pattern.

By the end, nine key factors remained. For teams to be successful in the international arena, they would need to score highly in a majority of these categories – a serendipitous mix of circumstance, luck and vision.

The categories were:

1 Football Fervour

Passion, intensity and hot-headedness (off the pitch rather than on it), coupled with a long-standing football culture and love of the beautiful game all translate to success on the pitch. It mostly favours Latin countries where football is part of the fabric of society and the passion is dialled up to 11.

2 Economic Status

Put simply, money talks. Developed countries can focus on building facilities, promoting its footballing activities and sustaining the professional game to a high standard. Disposable income also allows people to put their time and energy into the sport.

Developing countries, however, don’t have that luxury, and consequently fare worse. Even if there is a huge pool of talent, the lack of financial stability in both the public realm and day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens means footballing potential may never be realised.

3 Population Size

The more the merrier. A large pool of aspiring footballers beats a small pool. For clubs and consequently the national team it means more initial choice, more players that make it through, and more chances for them to shine and develop into world beaters.

4 Competing Sports

The effect of population size will be diminished if you have competing sports. Are the kids into rugby, skiing, basketball? Maybe cricket, ice hockey, table tennis or baseball? In Brazil, this question will get some quizzical looks. Ask it in places like Austria, India, Japan or the US and the answer is quite likely to be a firm yes to at least one of those. So the full talent pool is not exploited for football. Fair enough. Other sports are good too. Some are even great. But it won’t help your national football team.

5 First Participation

Starting early and stealing a march on others makes the world of difference. These teams are contesting the finals before other countries have reached footballing maturity.

Of those who have joined the World Cup party late, most didn’t manage to qualify in the early years of the tournament. Some didn’t bother to qualify (ahem, England). And while these teams were missing, those who had made it to those early finals were competing in a smaller tournament than later years, leading to a higher likelihood of success.

Oh, and the teams participating in that first World Cup in 1930? They were few and far between. Most teams invited couldn’t make it, so those who did well weren’t necessarily competing against the top teams in the world at the time.

All this leaves fewer opportunities for later debutants to rack up the expected points in our model.

Of course, as time goes on and more tournaments are played, those early years become less important, and will play a smaller part in the overall calculation.

6 Continental Lift

Real-life events guide the thinking with this factor. Often the only difference between the overall record of two similar countries is the fact that the better performing nation might hail from Europe or South America. The suspicion is that a continent’s historic connection to the sport matters. When a team regularly has to qualify against countries who are also steeped in the tradition, history and passions of the game, there’s a collective uplift. Long-running domestic leagues along with tough inter-club competition across the continent help to prepare national teams for big games and high stakes. It all creates a mutually beneficial cycle of success. This means, ultimately, that Europe and South America take all the points in the calculation.

In our model, however, Turkey and Russia – two countries that straddle Europe and Asia – have been scored down. Yes, they qualify against European nations, but due to fewer citizens across their whole population experiencing the football connections as described above, only countries with both feet wholly in our front-running continents reap the benefits.

Also to be noted is that until 1994, every edition of the finals bar Mexico ’70 and ’86 was held on these two continents (plus many since), so there was always a European or South American team enjoying home advantage – see the next factor.

7 Tournaments Hosted

If you’re lucky enough to host a tournament or two, the lift in performance is noticeable. No fewer than six editions have been won by the host – think Uruguay, France, Argentina, and of course England among others. Other hosts have also done much better than they perhaps ought to, namely Sweden, Chile and South Korea. So get yourself in the running to host a tournament (scoring highly in some of the other factors such as Economic Status and Football Fervour will help) and you may just have increased your chances of going deep.

8 Summer Heat

This one is a left-field addition.

As a general rule, the more sweltering the summers, the more people live their lives outdoors, the healthier the overall population, the more chance of success at the highest levels of the international game. And the fiery temperament that can come with the heat helps too. Simple.

9 The God Factor

And then there’s this.

I’m not talking about your regular gods of religion; this is not that type of exercise. It’s about gods of football. And it goes way beyond your ordinary footballing geniuses like George Best or Alfredo Di Stéfano. God level is reserved for the very few – maybe just three. The list will always be subjective and Lord knows the discussion point of countless debates in every corner of the world. But still, I’ve picked mine here. This list is reserved for ***OPINION ALERT*** Pelé, Maradona and Messi. That’s it. There’s no Brazilian Ronaldo and no Portuguese Ronaldo (yup). There’s no Zidane, no Platini, Eusebio or Puskás.

These three South Americans have been chosen because of the disproportionate influence they’ve had on a world stage, and the World Cup in particular. And, of course, because they play the beautiful game like a god.

Would Brazil have won three World Cups in four tournaments without Pelé? Remember that a full 60% of their total haul has come with him in the team. Argentina certainly wouldn’t have won in ’86 without El Diego or got as far as a narrow final defeat 4 years later. And Messi has taken an average Argentina team to a final and a win. So far.

Honourable mentions go to Johan Cryuff and Gerd Müller, who were by all accounts massively influential in their nations’ performances in the ’70s, and were arguably the two world stars of that decade. But if we open up the doors to them, we open it up to 20 or 30 more players, and the God Factor breaks down. So three gods it is.

It might also explain why Spain have not won more. They’ve never had the privilege of a Messi. Nor have England. Bobby Charlton – the magnificent player he was – may have contributed to England’s win on home soil in 1966, but he was not good enough to drag England beyond the quarter-finals in either ’62 or ’70.

So we’re talking about the absolute best of the best, across all the ages and across the globe. They can elevate an already great team to the greatest heights or haul an average team singlehandedly over the line. They inspire others to go way beyond. When footballing gods are this good, it makes an almighty difference.

But the God Factor is also slightly different to the other categories. It’s not quantifiable and it’s not predictable. There aren’t necessarily a set of inputs or boxes ticked that would guarantee you supreme footballing talent. Certainly scoring highly in some of the other factors will help, but you need a humongous element of luck – no, alchemy – to end up with a Pelé, Maradona or Messi. So although the God Factor is a contributing factor to overall international success just like the others, it can’t be used to forecast, at least not in direct terms. It can only be used to understand past performance.

Weighting

Once the nine categories were in place, I looked at weighting them. Is a country’s economic status worth more or less than their early participation in the World Cup? How much impact do average summer highs have? How much should population size affect the overall score? How much of an X-factor is God Factor?

Thresholds within each category were also necessary for point-scoring. For example, in Economic Status top marks of 20 points went to the richest nations, 10 points to upper middle income countries, 5 points to lower income, and no points for the poorest.

Countries

The next job was to decide which teams to include.

The aim of the whole exercise is to measure and track success. But what is success? If we limited it to just those nations who have won the tournament it would be a very short, dull and unenlightening task. So I extended it to all teams to reach at least the semi-final (ie play the full number of games possible).

Even then, success isn’t the only criteria for appearing in the list – two other groups were added: former hosts and a few significant but as yet unsuccessful countries such as India, China and Nigeria to help stress-test the logic.

I was aware that not including every eligible country in my calculations would remove nuance and produce ‘unscientific’ results. But I decided for my sanity and the sake of a clean infographic to accept that this was a broad-brushstroke exercise and not a model that would pass scientific peer review. Not that it could anyway; the small sample size of just 22 World Cup editions means that it can never paint the truest picture of performance and ability. Unless we play the World Cup thousands of times and include every country to be associated with it, there will be anomalies and outliers galore. So we’re left with a compact list of just 33 nations.

Data

Despite this, I still felt the need to source proper data for each team where possible in order to plot their scores into the categories. I sourced relative strength of economies from a 2012 UN document and latest population sizes from the World Bank, and did the same for most of the categories. Although the data couldn’t represent each country’s shifting status across the 90-year lifespan of the World Cup, they were real figures and are indicative of the relative positions of each nation against each other.

In three categories – Football Fervour, Competing Sports and of course the God Factor – the data was (carefully considered) opinion. That’s the way it goes when it’s just a bit of fun.

Using this data I was able to tot up each country’s score and plot them on the chart in order of predicted success.

Actual performance

Once the prediction criteria and data was set – and the teams plotted – I moved on to charting their real-life performances. There was just one thing to grapple with here: how to assign relative scores to winners, runners-up, and third/fourth place, which would determine the heights of the bars in the chart. I settled on an appearance in the final being worth twice as much as in a semi-final, with a win worth four times more than being runner-up. The premium for winning the whole thing was put in place because, well, you don’t get that star above your badge for nothing. Additionally, it made sense not to differentiate between third and fourth place as teams haven’t always been able to give their all to win the playoff, so including this distinction would just throw the results off.

Twiddling the dials

And then, adjustments and readjustments. All the values I eventually settled on were the result of constant tweaking of thresholds and points allocations until each team’s predicted and actual performance magically aligned. Well, roughly aligned for some teams considering the data points are not exhaustive and the number of World Cups contested is small.

Observations and insights

So what came out of all this? What did I learn, if anything? Were there nuggets of insight and truth uncovered in the patterns? Or were there just, ‘hmmm that’s mildly interesting’ moments? As with most things it was a bit of both.

Success is a curve

With the model’s scoring system, actual performance is exponential vs expected performance. With a slight uptick in expectation comes much more success. In other words just a few more predicted points than your nearest rival and you may well be winning a lot more.

In fact, the curve is steep enough that the top 3 performing nations are as successful as the rest put together.

Zones of success

There are tallies of predicted points that fuel expectations of success. Once a country moves into 55-point-plus territory there’s a good chance of a semi-final. If they find themselves in the 65-point zone they might reach a final. 70 points and above starts to get them wins. And once they move beyond 75 points we’re looking at serial winners.

This is where the benefits of this exercise come to bear, revealing slightly hidden patterns and insights. If you were to wager anything at the next World Cup, perhaps don’t bother betting the house on our regular football powerhouses going for the win. You might be better placed looking to the mid-table area between 65 and 70 points and finding a dark horse to back for a deep run (or even sporting immortality if you’re feeling brave). All of them knocking on the door, all a more interesting proposition than Brazil or Italy prevailing again. And this time no need for the dubious predictive skills of a German octopus.

Going big

Size matters. All teams to win a World Cup score highly in the population stakes with their number of citizens comfortably above the world average of 40 million people (except Uruguay who have a tiny population – more on them later). But size alone isn’t always the key. It needs to be coupled with a high or upper-middle income economy to make a difference.

Football fever

No country to get to the final has any serious competition to rival football as the number one sport domestically. When football is foremost in the nation’s consciousness and combined with an intense passion for the game, you are much more likely to find success on the international stage. It’s why South American teams have done well, and Uruguay in particular. Likewise Italy who also score top marks for Football Fervour. And even though the rest of Europe can’t rival Latin countries for intensity, there is still an unparalleled passion for the game among the winning European countries – Germany, France, England and Spain.

Home run

Unsurprisingly home advantage is an advantage. 11 out of 18 former hosts have had their best performance at a home World Cup. Put another way, the host nation has achieved their best result in 12 out of 22 editions (Mexico did this twice). And when it comes specifically to winners, home advantage becomes even more significant. Out of the 8 winning nations, 6 have won it at their home tournament (all have hosted the tournament at least once). Clearly home comforts play a major part in a country’s prospects.

Continental head start

The European and South American head start is surprisingly dominant. All 8 winners are from these two continents. So are all finalists. And out of 11 teams who’ve made it as far as a semi-final, only 3 are not from these two land masses.

Further down the table, the continental uplift is also in effect – it’s often the difference between middling countries. If you’re not from Europe or South America, your big population, good economy and fervent support won’t – for now – get you very far at a tournament.

So how do other continents get a look in? And how does Continental Lift stop being a thing? As the earlier point about home advantage demonstrates, perhaps we start with hosting. If you get a wider variety of countries to host (a recent trend that looks set to continue), it opens up automatic qualification to less traditional nations in less traditional continents, thus getting them in the door. In turn it bestows home benefits upon them and turbo boosts their campaign. It also brings these tournaments closer to neighbouring populations, a benefit almost exclusively experienced by Europe and South America. And it snowballs from there. All of this will reduce early participation as an advantage and with it the arbitrary head start afforded by the continental lottery.

Colour matters (somehow)

And a fun one. Blue teams in our list and those wearing cooler colours tend to do better. Red teams and warmer colours sit towards the middle and bottom of the performance table. Green teams don’t do well. I couldn’t tell you why. Even if expected results mirrored actual results exactly, not much changes. Only Spain and Mexico – red and green respectively – would shift a little higher up the table.

Overachievers and underachievers

In the final reckoning there are some outliers – three clear underachievers, three debatable ones, and two overachievers. One could argue that the existence of any outliers just shows up holes in the logic. In truth, however, a small dataset will always throw up some funny numbers. Perhaps in a hundred years, with the spikes and dips smoothed out, every team will have performed to par. So, for now at least, they’re over- and underachievers.

Overachievers

At the time of writing in 2024, it’s Uruguay that stands out as performing better than expected, especially considering its minute population compared with other winners. But you have to go far back in time for most of their successes; they are definitely dining out on past glories. In the very early years of the tournament, Uruguay benefited from being there before other nations had got their act together to romp to two victories. Home advantage helped in one of them. But if they continue their recent average performances (notwithstanding a recent semi-final place), recalculating this model with every future edition of the World Cup will see their expected score fall back into the pack.

The other overachiever, Morocco, is perhaps less obvious, with their single semi-final place. But by my calculation so little is expected of them that their run in Qatar to fourth place is a stunning overachievement, highlighted by the only mini tower at the lower end of the infographic. Semi-finals are usually reserved for teams with at least 15 predicted points more than them.

Underachievers

Here there are a few glaring standouts. A couple are fairly obvious when you think about it, even if we don’t exactly know the reasons why – looking at you Spain and Mexico. One, however, is not so obvious: Poland. Probably a surprise for many of us, both in expected points and their consequent underachievement, but the contributing factors in our model don’t lie.

Spain – with their very high expected points total – is curious. Notwithstanding their purple period 15 years ago, is there a legitimate reason for their underachievement over the decades that still makes sense within the framework of this exercise? Answers on a postcard.

With Mexico and Poland, their past performance is even more perplexing.

Mexico really should be making their large population, passionate following and multiple confederation titles count. But they’ve won nothing, and have never even reached a semi-final, despite hosting two editions of the tournament (though they did get to their highest placing of the quarter-final both times they hosted). Like Spain, the reasons aren’t clear.

Poland, meanwhile, is a steady European force and according to the model would be expected to compete similarly to England and the Netherlands (unless the vagaries of the small sample size is throwing their actual score out).

The final set of underachievers are less glaring but below par nevertheless. Two sit in the mid-table area around 65-70 points. Our model indicates that Russia and Chile should be performing at a similar level to their close neighbours in the chart: Croatia (including Yugoslavia), Hungary, Czechia (incl. Czechoslovakia), Sweden, Belgium and Portugal. All these teams have been to at least two semi-finals, with four making the final at least once. Russia and Chile have one solitary semi-final each.

Switzerland are also slight underachievers. Less is expected of them, but their early start in World Cups, coupled with their position at the centre of European football (and Fifa) would suggest they could have done better. Perhaps it’s harsh, but then again the margin of expected performance is wide and yet they still fall short.

Predictions

Now for some fun. Can this model be used to predict future performance based on where we expect a team to be?

Each World Cup cycle is heavily influenced by the form and personnel of the players and coaching staff at the time. It’s so localised to a particular moment that talking about individual editions of the World Cup can be dangerous. This model is of course a much longer-term analysis of form. But it’s always enjoyable to speculate about the next tournament or two.

Perhaps if a team has underachieved relative to their expected level, it’s not because they are destined never to achieve, but because it just hasn’t happened for them yet in the relatively few World Cups played.

So I’ll focus on these teams, with the massive caveat that current form and skill levels aren’t included in the analysis.

Narrowing it down further, our model can then used to tease out other factors apart from form that might contribute to a future uptick in performance. Particular jokers in the pack that might give these nations an edge. When that is part of the equation, who of our underachievers is ripe for a big performance?

• Underachievers they might be, but at least Spain have got to the top of the tree before. You feel the recent success they had in 2010 was a rebalancing of the footballing powers, propelling them to an expected performance level they should remain at. So they should perform again soon despite the lack of a Xavi, Iniesta or even Busquets in their current squad.
• Mexico are about to become the only nation to host 3 tournaments. They’re co-hosting the 2026 edition with the US and Canada so home advantage could finally move them closer to their par score.
• Could Chile start fulfilling their potential? I’m torn. On the one hand they were great just two World Cup cycles ago when they lost to the hosts in the second round, but won two Copa Americas in the following years. They could regain the magic soon. On the other hand, you could say they peaked 8 years ago, and are unlikely to repeat that form so soon on the world stage.
• Sadly for Poland, the next tournament may have come too late. Their talisman, the prolific Robert Lewandowski, may still be a formidable goal machine and standout player in world football, but he’ll be in his late thirties by 2026 and may not be able to make the difference that pulls Poland a little further up the performance table.
• Russia’s recent circumstances suggest they won’t be doing much any time soon. Their self-inflicted woes and ostracisation from the international and sporting community show no signs of ending.
• And there is nothing in our model or factors to indicate that Switzerland will fulfil their predicted potential in the coming tournaments.

A look at where we’re headed

Further into the future, things start to look interesting.

The game is flourishing globally with interest, money and, of course, fervour igniting fans and players on every continent. This brings newer national teams into play – particularly in Africa and Asia – who weren’t traditionally part of the worldwide football fraternity. They will play a bigger and bigger part in future tournaments. And as time goes on the impact of these countries’ omission from early tournaments will fade, as will the existing European and South American hegemony.

How close is this future? And can our model highlight those who might benefit?

For example, could the regional economic powerhouse that is Nigeria, with its emergent population explosion, start to compete?

What about big-money China and Saudi Arabia? They’re plunging billions into the sport, bringing talent and experience into their world. They might finally start to show their teeth (though China will have to improve significantly considering they’ve only qualified once for the tournament – in 2002).

The US is attracting bigger names too, with an established – and massive – economy and growing football history. They should be having deeper runs. With their upcoming joint hosting in 2026 internal attention should turn to their national team, giving football a boost for the next campaign and way beyond.

South Korea should also reach the heights of their 2002 success again. Their above average size and ever-growing love for the game (not least to do with their own current superstar Son Heung-min) might necessitate a rescoring sometime in the future, propelling them up the expected and actual performance tables.

And perhaps a longer way into the future, one wonders if India’s burgeoning love for the game, expanding middle class and now world-leading population could improve their predicted score, despite cricket remaining their number one passion.

This is not to mention the numerous countries that have been omitted from this exercise who could develop the requisite points to make a splash.

Back to the beginning

But finally, bringing it back full circle, what does all this say about England’s future chances? Well firstly, as is evident in the data, they’re doing about as well as they should be. No more, no less. So I’ll keep my expectations firmly in check and probably stick with another quarter- or semi-final place in 2026. And if they got to the final or even won the whole damn thing? Well, I wouldn’t say it was coming.