Gratuitous and Rather Useless World Cup Post

I am not a soccer fan, I prefer the American version of football. That said, I am admittedly actively following the 2010 World Cup. While watching the opening match between South Africa and Mexico, I thought it would be fun to ask the question, “Do free countries produce better football teams?”

So, I quickly combined the FIFA World Rankings and Press Freedom Index for all of the countries participating in the 2010 World Cup, and came up with this:

Note, the Press Freedom Index goes from 0.00 (most free) to 115.00 (least free), and the FIFA point totals increase as the teams overall quality improves, so we might expect a negative relationship. Also, I removed North Korea from the data set because it was such an extreme outlier on the press freedom dimension. So, we find basically a null result. There is a slight negative relationship, but it is essentially random.

The peak and valley of the smoothed fit curve is a bit interesting. For the worst teams, as freedom goes down the quality of the teams go up, but around a freedom score of 20, that relations inverses and as the quality of the teams increases so does the level of freedom—until we reach the best team, Brazil and Spain.

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