Euro Qualifiers Round up
Cyprus (12/1), Albania (9/1) and Northen Ireland (13/2) pulled off the biggest upsets of the first international week of Euro Qualifiers. We also saw big starts from the Czech Republic and England.
Bosnia, Portugal, Netherlands and Greece all suffering from a World Cup hangover and are the big losers from the initial set of games. With a potential of three from the group to qualify, I expect all these to pull themselves back into a qualifying position before the end of the campaign.
Table below shows the betting trend for the Group Winners market. Portugal and Greece make significant nose dives.
Here on fog2014 we are also keeping an eye on how the matches affect the FIFA ranking. There has been some media focus on the FIFA rankings in recent months on football-rankings.info and The Mirror. This is because there is less than 12 months to go before the Seeding for the 2018 World Cup Qualifying Draw. The ranking points are accumulated over 4 years with most recent 12 months results given the most weight. So if you want to make an impact on the rankings before the seeding this year is the critical year. Ranking points earned this year account for 50% of your total. Italy experienced being on the wrong end of the seeding in WC2014.
The losers in this regard this week are first Poland and Serbia. Serbia are suffering from being drawn in the 5 team group, so have less matches to build up ranking points - they didn't play this week. Poland played Gibraltar but FIFA do not recognise Gibraltar (at least not yet), so they also earned no ranking points this week.
Below lists the estimated FIFA ranking for the next release (Sep 18) and divided into Pots based on top 9, next best 9 etc.
Bosnia, Portugal, Netherlands and Greece all suffering from a World Cup hangover and are the big losers from the initial set of games. With a potential of three from the group to qualify, I expect all these to pull themselves back into a qualifying position before the end of the campaign.
Table below shows the betting trend for the Group Winners market. Portugal and Greece make significant nose dives.
Here on fog2014 we are also keeping an eye on how the matches affect the FIFA ranking. There has been some media focus on the FIFA rankings in recent months on football-rankings.info and The Mirror. This is because there is less than 12 months to go before the Seeding for the 2018 World Cup Qualifying Draw. The ranking points are accumulated over 4 years with most recent 12 months results given the most weight. So if you want to make an impact on the rankings before the seeding this year is the critical year. Ranking points earned this year account for 50% of your total. Italy experienced being on the wrong end of the seeding in WC2014.
The losers in this regard this week are first Poland and Serbia. Serbia are suffering from being drawn in the 5 team group, so have less matches to build up ranking points - they didn't play this week. Poland played Gibraltar but FIFA do not recognise Gibraltar (at least not yet), so they also earned no ranking points this week.
Below lists the estimated FIFA ranking for the next release (Sep 18) and divided into Pots based on top 9, next best 9 etc.
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I expect England to make Pot 1 (the calamity of the world cup will become less relevant by the time the seedings are decided - the weighting of those result will drop). At whose expense though? Are the slip ups from Greece and Portugal going to cost them? Ireland have a long ways to climb but there will be points available against Scotland who are ranked relatively highly and so Ireland can earn relatively high number of points for beating them when that match comes around.
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