Ranking Iceland’s Football Team
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is Iceland the best football team in the world per capita? England suffered a 2-1 defeat to Iceland in the European Football Championship in France. This was embarrassing for England when you consider its population is 163 times bigger than Iceland’s. We take a look at whether Iceland is now the best performing football team in the world if you compare UEFA ranking to the size of each country’s population. Plus, we take a look at the chances of a young man in Iceland and in England getting to represent their country on the pitch.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, the programme that looks at the numbers in the news and in life. |
| 0:19.6 | I'm Charlotte Mac McDonald. And I'm |
| 0:21.2 | Jordan Dunbar. Later we'll be answering listeners questions about who voted for and against |
| 0:26.2 | Brexit in the UK's EU referendum. But first. Last week saw one of the biggest sporting |
| 0:32.0 | upsets in recent football history. In the Euro 2016 football competition, Iceland, a tiny nation of only 330,000, |
| 0:40.5 | beat the inventors of football, England in a shock victory. |
| 0:44.4 | Iceland was one of the ultimate underdogs in the Euro 2016 competition. They're managers |
| 0:49.1 | a dentist, they're no professional teams, they're all part-time, it's too dark to practice |
| 0:53.6 | for more than half the year. |
| 0:55.3 | The population is so small that if you happen to be a man between 20 and 40, you've got a one in |
| 1:02.0 | 2,000 chance of being picked by their manager slash dentist and getting a place in the squad. |
| 1:07.9 | A young man in England, on the other hand, has a less than one in three hundred |
| 1:12.6 | thousand chance based on a pool of about seven million. |
| 1:16.6 | I'm not trying to rob it in England, honest. |
| 1:18.6 | This got us thinking, does that make Iceland the greatest team in the world accounting for |
| 1:23.6 | its size? |
| 1:24.6 | FIFA is an organisation that brings the world's football associations together |
| 1:28.7 | and it ranks international teams. We decided to take a look at what happens when you compare |
| 1:34.4 | those rankings to a country's population size. The official FIFA rankings haven't been updated |
| 1:39.8 | since before the start of both the European and Copa tournament in North and South America. |
| 1:44.5 | So we got some help updating the rankings from Edward Rankwick in Romania, |
... |
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