ROAD TO '22

This set is intended to represent the national teams of the world as they were around 2020-22, with a particular focus on World Cup qualifying, for Lambourne Games' The Beautiful Game.

The low numbers of games played by international teams, and the difficulty in comparing teams between continents, means that it's difficult to capture a team's true strength. San Marino are an ideal case study; they are comfortably stronger than many of the minnows in the Caribbean and Pacific, but San Marino linger at the bottom of the official FIFA rankings because they're comfortably the worst team in the European zone, whereas teams in the Oceania zone can pick up ranking points from each other. Higher ranking teams are affected by the discrepancy as well - it's very easy for a 10-0 win over San Marino in qualifying to have an outsize impact on a team's 'raw' goals per game value.

This set attempts to work around that issue by using an adaption of Vince Hughes' Eurogrid system, a copy of which is included in this archive. Look up a team's Attack and their opponent's Defense on the Eurogrid chart to determine match cards per half.
Teams only have one attack and defense value. A team playing at home should be given one extra match card in each half.
Additionally, at the start of the second half, roll a d10 once per team; 0-4 do nothing, 5-9 add one match card for that team in the second half.

The set includes 211 FIFA members and 9 non-members (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Zanzibar, Western Sahara, Tibet, Northern Marianas, Monaco, Tuvalu).
Russia were expelled from 2022 qualifying at the playoff stage and suspended from international competition following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I include a Russia card for the sake of completeness. The inclusion, or non-inclusion, of any representative team in this set is in no way intended as a political statement.


Credits:
The Beautiful Game (c) Lambourne Games
Kits from Colours of Football
Player data from Transfermarkt and FBRef.net
World rankings based on FiveThirtyEight data
