America to win World Cup 2006?

Maradona was a strange superstar, having drug problems among other things. I never liked him; he dove too often.
If a player dives and fakes an injury, he loses all credibility.
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OK, that is one fat footballer among millions. Anyone else?
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As an aside, an interesting report in SPIEGEL online

Quote:

SPIEGEL ONLINE - June 13, 2006

CZECHS ON AMERICAN BUD
"It's Missing the Taste of Beer"

The Yanks are going all the way, baby.
ALL!
THE!
WAY!

George wrote:

The Yanks are going all the way, baby.
ALL!
THE!
WAY!

I read something to the effect that they're supposed to be the 5th ranked team in the world?

They must get easy runs through qualifying because FIFA so desperately wants the game to gain popularity in that wealthy country.

If there are 32 teams in the world cup then surly Australias ranking must be at least 32.

If enough monkeys throw enough darts they will probably get it right one year.

Why concentrate on one man who has a weight problem. He used to be the best, now he is just another player. He is still able to run for 90 minutes, tha is more than many athletes can do.

Anyone know what the actual formula is?
(The monkeys would probably do better.)

Taken into consideration for the ranking are all international-A match results over a time span of the last eight years:

World Cup finals matches World Cup preliminary matches FIFA Confederations Cup matches Continental championship final matches Continental championship preliminary matches Friendly matches

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) 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 importance of a game is also considered - a World Cup encounter is weighted more heavily than a friendly match. The method applied here is to use a pre-calculated factor by which the points totals of a given match are multiplied.

The factors used are:

Friendly match x 1.00 Continental championship preliminary x 1.50 World Cup preliminary match x 1.50 Continental championship finals match x 1.75 FIFA Confederations Cup match x 1.75 World Cup finals match x 2.00

This means that qualifying matches are weighted 50% higher than friendlies, continental final round matches 75 % higher and matches during World Cup finals twice as much.

Wilso wrote:

George wrote:

The Yanks are going all the way, baby.
ALL!
THE!
WAY!

I read something to the effect that they're supposed to be the 5th ranked team in the world?

They were even 4th in April :wink:

(Australia is 44th, Germany 19th, England 6th ...)

USA team has no hope of winning and I would put a bet on that, they are a predictable training ground team. I would be surprised if they get past the first round, my money's on germany

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Wilso wrote:

George wrote:

The Yanks are going all the way, baby.
ALL!
THE!
WAY!

I read something to the effect that they're supposed to be the 5th ranked team in the world?

They were even 4th in April :wink:

(Australia is 44th, Germany 19th, England 6th ...)

These FIFA rankings mean nothing. USA is getting the points thereby defeating teams like Dominican republic, Puerto Rico etc. It is based on the points the teams take for their local zone official games, means nothing about the teams ability.

And for the World cup.... don't you think you guys are a bit hurry? Football is not that deeloped yet in the USA. If Americans continue to have interest in football, as they started the last years, in 4 or 5 World cups, winning it will be something possible for them.