Friday, December 18, 2015

How CHAN could put a dent in your World Cup hopes

What is CHAN?

African Nations Championship - a tournament exclusively players from the national league. You must play in the league of your country to be eligible. An Angolan player in the South African league is not eligible.



For some of the top African national teams, very few players from their CHAN team are selected for the national team, yet in February 2011 CAF asked FIFA to consider CHAN matches as "A" matches and include them in the FIFA ranking calculation. And they got what they asked for.

I posted earlier the sims for the 3rd round CAF draw. I was curious to see the impact of the CHAN final tournament on the pots, thus I ran another set of simulations without the CHAN matches.

Team - Average pot with CHAN - Average pot without CHAN - Difference


Morocco 3.7674 3.409 -0.3584
Congo DR 3.0049 2.7608 -0.2441
Uganda 2.9314 2.7053 -0.2261
Cameroon 2.2838 2.0974 -0.1864
Zambia 3.9131 3.8164 -0.0967
Tunisia 1.9595 1.8981 -0.0614
Mali 3.0739 3.056 -0.0179
Côte d'Ivoire 1.0046 1 -0.0046
Gabon 4 4 0
Libya 4 4 0
Algeria 1 1.0012 0.0012
Nigeria 2.144 2.159 0.015
Ghana 1.015 1.0327 0.0177
Guinea 2.3831 2.4285 0.0454
Burkina Faso 3.8047 3.8733 0.0686
Cape Verde Islands 1.1967 1.2817 0.085
Senegal 1.4498 1.5705 0.1207
Egypt 1.8661 2.1064 0.2403
Congo 2.2939 2.5806 0.2867
South Africa 2.9081 3.2231 0.315

Morocco, Congo DR, Uganda, Cameroon and Zambia will all be in Rwanda in January.

On the other hand, we have South Africa, Congo, Egypt, Senegal and Cape Verde Islands.

Egypt and Cape Verde Islands chose not to take part - I don't know if this was a planned choice, but it was very wise.

South Africa and Congo failed to qualify being eliminated by Angola and Cameroon respectively. South Africa and Angola also met in round 2 of the World Cup qualifiers and with no CHAN restrictions on the squads, Bafana Bafana booked their place in the 3rd round.

However, Senegal should clap themselves thunderously on the back for being eliminated by Guinea in the final round of CHAN qualification. Guinea advanced on away goals and the fate of the tie hung in balance, with Senegal needing a goal after Ibrahima Keita scoring two with 1 minute left of regular time.

In October 2017, Senegal might well look back to this CHAN elimination as they key to their 2018 FIFA World Cup qualification.

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.

2 comments:

  1. Exactly, CHAN matches will affect ranking for Tunisia in their competition with Egypt, Senegal, Cap Verde in the 1st Pot seeding.

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