Who Had the Hardest Route to WC2014 Qualification?

Which team had the easiest time qualifying for the 2014 World Cup? How about the hardest?

To answer these questions I created an index of achievement. Specifically, I took the October 2013 FIFA World Rankings and used them as the basis for creating an index based on performance in World Cup qualification. I used a simple metric, a team gets all of their opponents ranking points for a win and half of those points for a draw. Of course, a defeat results in zero points. One could of course devise other plausible ways of tallying points.

According to FIFA there were 820 matches in total played in qualification for the 2014 World Cup. Not all teams played the same number of qualifiers, nor did each team face the same quality of opponents.

Here is how the numbers stack up:

1	Argentina	9769
2	Colombia	8172
3	Ecuador	7689
4	Uruguay	7445
5	Chile	6903
6	USA	6546
7	Costa Rica	6156
8	Belgium	6149
9	Honduras	5879
10	Mexico	5734
11	Portugal	4996
12	Croatia	4832
13	Netherlands	4705
14	Italy	4556
15	Switzerland	4293
16	Germany	4161
17	Greece	4151
18	France	4111
19	Australia	4084
20	Iran	3703
21	Spain	3694
22	Japan	3635
23	South Korea	3619
24	Russia	3570
25	Bosnia	3485
26	England	3240
27	Cameroon	3081
28	Algeria	2506
29	Ivory Coast	2161
30	Nigeria	1927
31	Ghana	1919
32	Brazil	0

Brazil obviously had the easiest route to qualification, serving as host and automatically qualifying.  The highest achievers come all from CONMEBOL, with Argentina leading the way. The USA was next highest. Belgium is the highest performer from UEFA.

Germany and Greece sit squarely in the middle. England was the lowest achieving UEFA squad, earning less than one third of the points tallied by Argentina. The 5 CAF teams all fall at the bottom of the rankings.

All data for this exercise comes from FIFA.

Nick Harris (@sportingintel) parses the data in per match fashion: