Bunmi Ogunyale
African champions, the Super Falcons have dropped three places in the latest FIFA Ranking from Zurich, Switzerland.
In the new ranking, Nigeria got 1,614 points as against her previous 1,643 to placed 39th in the world and number one in Africa ahead of Cameroon, South Africa and Ghana.
USA will end 2019 as they began it on top of the FIFA Women’s World Ranking. Brazil also head into 2020 in familiar territory, having made an immediate return to the top 10 – after dropping out in September for the first time in their history.
Having been rewarded for recent friendly wins over England (sixth, down one) and Canada (eighth, down one), the Brazilians (ninth, up two) are essentially the only notable climbers in the table’s upper echelons. Korea DPR (11th, down two), with whom they swapped places, dropped down due to not having played since the ranking’s last edition.
The big moves took place further down the ladder, and reflected the fact that CAF and Concacaf’s Olympic qualifiers have produced the most significant recent upsets. In the latter region, St Kitts and Nevis’s (127th, up seventh) stunning away victory in Trinidad and Tobago (72nd, down 11) provided the biggest points haul, and took the victors through to the final stage of Concacaf’s Tokyo 2020 preliminaries.
The next FIFA Women’s World Ranking will be published on March 27, 2020.