DISCLAIMERS: WE TRY TO MAKE OUR FOOTBALL SIMULATIONS AS ACCURATE AS POSSIBLE. HERE ARE SOME DIFFICULTIES.

WHY WE DON'T INCLUDE RESULTS FROM INTERNATIONAL FRIENDLIES IN OUR DATABASE

FootySimulator uses a database which holds the results of around 20,000 international football matches that have taken place since 1916. You can view these results using the various search options that are available once you have logged in.

The first thing to bear in mind is that friendly matches are NOT included. When nothing is at stake this creates a sense of unreality amongst the players, managers and supporters who are participating. And it's not just the fact that the manager might make six substitutions at half time, it's the fact that the players seem to be more bothered about the Champions League match that is coming up the following week, that their club manager has only allowed the key players to play 45 minutes or that the international manager might have selected five Spurs players for a joke. The point is, this isn't bona fide international football. In 1998, England drew at home to Saudi Arabia in a friendly. Brazil regularly send an XI out to places like China for commercial reasons and often fail to win. Germany have a diabolical record in friendlies but always seem to get it right when it really matters.

The international friendly experience is a bit like playing poker with matchsticks. The rules are essentially the same but nobody plays in quite the same way as if there was money involved. So friendlies are excluded from the FootySimulator database.

3rd / 4th place play-offs generally have a similar feel to international friendlies. The participants are gutted to have fallen at the semi-final stage and are relatively unconcerned about whether they finish third or fourth in the tournament. These results are included in the tournament data for completeness. However these games a lower weighting than other games in the tournament so as not to corrupt the ratings.

By the same token, please do not use statistics based on competitive matches to predict the results of international friendlies.

WHY THE RATINGS FOR TOURNAMENT HOST NATIONS MAY NOT BE AS ACCURATE AS FOR OTHER TEAMS

As this site is only based on competitive games, this will occasionally lead to areas of uncertainty. The host country of a major tournament does not usually have to qualify. This could mean that a host nation's statistics are around 2 years old. I believe this is the lesser of 2 evils as the alternative option is to incorporate misleading friendly results into their ratings. As recent results are weighted much more heavily than older ones, the host nation's statistics will catch up very quickly once the tournament has begun.

N.B. When running simulations of for tournament matches, remember to give the hosts home advantage !

WHY RATINGS FOR TEAMS IN OCEANIA (AND TEAMS OUTSIDE FIFA) MAY NOT BE AS ACCURATE AS FOR OTHER TEAMS

FootySimulator bases its statistics on results that are weighted according to both the strength of the opposition and the competitiion as a whole. So how do you compare the relative strength of European football compared with, say, South American football ? Well, there is a wealth of data over numerous World Cups which tells us 1) how many times European teams beat the South American teams and vice versa 2) how often each continent wins the world cup.

From this wealth of data, it is possible to build up a sort of exchange rate for countries and continents. World Cup performances carry such a high weighting in FootySimulator that they can drag national and continental ratings up and down to reflect the new reality.

The problem is that Oceania has only ever had a handful of qualifiers for the World Cup, and they have only ever been Australia (in 1974 & 2006) and New Zealand (in 1982 & 2010). So it is very difficult to gauge the relative strength of the Oceania Confederation compared with the rest of the world.

This is not a problem if you run a simulation between 2 nations from the Oceania Confederation. However, if you simulate a match between an Oceania side and one from a different confederation, you are simulating an event that happens very rarely in international football. So this scenario has a lot less history behind it than if you play a European team against a South American team.