I've been able to catch most of the Euro matches though, and the US qualifier match, and I've gotta say this is my favorite month of soccer outside of the World Cup. Top it all off with going to another away match (I'll be in Philly for the Union-SKC game) and it's gonna be a great great month.
Given all that, I thought I'd try something new. Since I've got a spreadsheet formula mocked up to rate MLS teams over the season, I thought I'd try to apply the same formula to the UEFA teams. Now there's one major flaw in using this system, and that is that in the most recent competetive matchces for these teams they played in different groups against opponents of very different ability, and that often the friendly matches are used for tweaks and trials and not results, so I'm not going to say I feel these ratings and rankings are fair and representative. I will be interested to see how they evolve over the course of the tournement, though.
I've looked at the last 10 matche for each side, most recent five friendly and most recent five competetive (except for Ukraine and Poland) and come up with a rating and ranking in the same way I do for MLS sides. It actually seems like it sort of worked out not terribly, but I'll let you be the judge of that.
I'm going to try to update the results after the end of each set of matches and we'll see how it plays out. Ranking a knock out tournement is probably a silly thing to do anyway, but now that it's the weekend and I'm away from family and friends I've got some time to kill.
Team
|
Rank
|
Rating
|
Spain
|
1
|
4.975
|
Russia
|
2
|
4.875
|
Sweden
|
3
|
3.825
|
Ukraine
|
4
|
3.75
|
Portugal
|
5
|
3.65
|
Czech Republic
|
6
|
3.45
|
Germany
|
7
|
3.2
|
France
|
8
|
2.7
|
Ireland
|
9
|
2.65
|
Denmark
|
10
|
2.575
|
Italy
|
11
|
2.425
|
Netherlands
|
12
|
2.2
|
Greece
|
13
|
2.175
|
England
|
14
|
1.875
|
Poland
|
15
|
1.55
|
Croatia
|
16
|
1
|
The big surprise of course is how far down the Netherlands are, but then again they just lost to the Danes, so maybe if I had posted this early I would have been seen as prophetic?
Obviously this isn't intended to be used for predictions or anything, but, if we just go ahead and guess that the higher ranked team will will, it gets Russia over Czech Republic right, Poland and Greece drew, though they're very close in ratings, Denmark over Netherlands got picked correct, and Germany over Portugal was incorrect, though they're also very close in ratings. Today's picks would be Spain over Italy (seems reasonable but we're tied in the 15th minute as of my typing this) and then Ireland over Croatia.
Only time will tell...
Oh, and go Poland!
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