How strong is polish football? "Host paradox" in FIFA's ranking

Abstract

The paper analyzes unintiutive properties (paradoxes) of the FIFA's ranking of national football teams. The most surprising phenomenon is underrating the teams of the main championship tournament hosts. This "host effect" follows the absence of hosts in preliminaries and the resulting restriction of hosts' pre-tournament matches to friendlies that enter the FIFA system with low weights. Various models built with the FIFA data allow to estimate that the place of the Polish team as a host of Euro 2012 was lowered from 16 to 35 positions.