2010 World Cup seeding: The numbers behind France's failure

I won't go into the "France paid for Henry's handball" debate, I will just look at where did FFF go wrong and how could they have secured a top 7 spot in the October FIFA ranking.

Of course, it's about friendlies. Had France performed better in the qualifiers, they might have avoided the play-offs altogether.

When the October 2009 ranking was released, France had played four friendlies in the last 12 months:

19 Nov 2008 France - Uruguay 0 - 0
11 Feb 2009 France - Argentina 0 - 2
02 Jun 2009 France - Nigeria 0 - 1
05 Jun 2009 France - Turkey 1 - 0

The friendly against Turkey being the only win, I will leave it out.

In order to be in the top 7, France would have needed one of the following:

• win against Argentina
  
• draw against Argentina and get at least 4 points from the matches against Uruguay and Nigeria
• get 6 points from the matches against Uruguay and Nigeria
• cancel the Nigeria match (played on a non-FIFA date) and win against Uruguay

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About me:

Christian, husband, father x 3, programmer, Romanian. Started the blog in March 2007. Quit in April 2018. You can find me on LinkedIn.