Australia might be out of the World Cup but there’s still a lot to be happy about the Socceroos’ run in Qatar.
Despite defeat to Argentina in the last 16, this has been arguably the best performance of an Australian men’s team at a World Cup.
I’m not a football writer, so I’ll leave the discussion around the nuance and context for comparing the 2006 “golden generation” with the current team to writers who know more about the history, such as this piece from Guardian Australia’s Emma Kemp on the “platinum generation”, or this one from the Sydney Morning Herald’s Vince Rugari.
However, the 2022 Socceroos have on at least one metric posted the best result for a World Cup so far. The following chart shows the cumulative wins and losses from the group stage onwards – a win adds a point, a loss takes one away, and a draw does nothing.
This noisychart has (experimental!) audio enabled – the data is mapped to the sounds of a cheering crowd and a football kick, which rise and fall in volume and pitch respectively. The lowest value on the chart is -3, and the highest is 1:
From the chart, we can see that the 2022 squad advanced the furthest with the highest cumulative win score.
That said, there are many other ways of comparing teams - such as the Elo rating, which puts the current team lower than for previous World Cups. But I’m not here to argue for the merits of one stat over another, just to show that in some ways, this is the best World Cup Australia has ever had.
