Ailton on Stalteri

[ballboy]

Nah... ...it will be silly to solely judge a country's football standing based on this ranking. I have never had and will never do so... ...you can see that some teams are "interestingly" ranked ahead of the others yet you won't necessarily think that they should stack up in that way.

People should only use it as a rough reference... ...at least that's my take on the matter.

[An Observer]

I think the Greek league from all I have read and seen is far superior to the Scottish league. No question. I guess my point is this. Not that there are not some discrepancies (and some for many of the reasons already stated in this thread about winter/summer leagues and a few dominant teams) but that generally its pretty reflective of the strengths of the respective leagues (certainly more so than FIFAs team world rankings) and is based on the best evaluable indicator (actual results of the sides playing each other in competition (and not friendlies).

[Grizzly]

I think the Greek league is better than the Scottish as well as can be seen by my own rankings. My point is that at 6th and 9th place respectively, they are both placed too high on the ranking system and that Israel is dramatically too high. The system could be reasonably accurate for leagues that are relatively well balanced and have an equal number of spots and I doubt anyone has tremendous problems with the first five places. The problem is that the majority of European leagues have 2 or 3 strong teams and a lot of crappy teams but only the good ones are taken into consideration in this system. Even including the Intertoto results and grading each competition (giving the most points to Champion's League victories, less to UEFA Cup and less still to Intertoto victories) would improve the system immensely. The current system is similar to comparing two teams with 2 or 3 superstars. One team has a decent supporting cast while the other has players of vastly inferior quality. However instead of each team playing a game against each other the top 3 players play a game of 3 on 3 against each other and the teams are rated on this basis. This would obviously produce some widely inaccurate results about the strength of each team just as the league ranking system produces some widely innacurate results about league strengths. I don't see how anyone who has watched a fair number of matches in various European leagues could look at the current rankings from position 6 to 15 and claim that they are "pretty reflective of the strengths of the respective leagues".