IS IT COMING home? English football fans ask themselves that question every international tournament. Their country is the birthplace of the modern game, having codified the rules in 1863. It also hosts the most lucrative club league in the world. But football is now a global sport. Its governing body, FIFA, has more members than the United Nations. Where is its current home?
England invented the sport. But its modern centre of gravity lies elsewhere
For a long time the answer may have been Brazil. Its men’s side has lifted the World Cup more often than any other. But a simple tally of past wins is not a great proxy for current quality. (See: Brazil’s exit in the round of 16 this year.) Elo scores are a better measure: they reward a team’s performance at every match relative to the strength of its opponent. The highest-ranked side is currently Spain, which has advanced to the semi-finals.
Yet finding the global home of football is about more than quantifying the single best team. We have instead traced the sport’s centre of gravity—the point you reach after placing all 244 men’s national teams on a map and weighting each by its Elo score. That point has migrated more than 3,000 miles over the past century, following the sport’s balance of power.
In 1901 it sat just off England’s west coast. (The only national teams that played matches that year were England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.) As Europeans migrated westward so too did football. The first World Cup, hosted and won by Uruguay in 1930, featured nine teams from the Americas; only four European sides showed up. By the time Brazil claimed its fifth title in 2002, South American sides had won more than half of the 17 World Cups.
Football’s gravitational pull swung back east as more teams started playing football in Asia, and as Europe’s teams grew stronger. Four of the five World Cup champions since 2002 have been European; so were six of the eight quarter-finalists in this year’s tournament. The balance of the world’s greatest teams now sits in the Mediterranean, close to Spain and France—both favourites this time round. As a British newspaper, many journalists at The Economist hope football is coming home. Awkwardly for us, our analysis suggests that home is now closer to our southern neighbours.
