We at Astroheader have complained about the FIFA World Rankings before. FIFA has outdone themselves with the October 2009 version. Just an FYI, these rankings came out after the last round of World Cup qualifying on October 14th. UEFA still has to play their play-off rounds.

• To start the BS, Croatia, who failed to qualify for the World Cup, moved up one spot to 8th. Makes sense.
• Argentina moved up two positions to 6th for barely making it in the last day of qualifying.
• Portugal, who has not even qualified yet and has to play in the UEFA playoffs, moved up seven positions to 10th. Who the hell are they stroking off at FIFA?
• The Czech Republic, who also failed to qualify for the World Cup, moved up three positions to 15th.
• And by far one of the most awesome examples of the stellar ranking system, Denmark. Denmark won their group (over high ranking Portugal) and was one of the first teams to qualify out of Europe but dropped eleven places to 27th.
• Serbia dropped seven positions for qualifying. Thanks for playing.

In a related story of FIFA douchebaggery:

The European playoffs for the World Cup are comprised of eight teams that play an additional home and home series for the last four places from the European region. At the beginning of qualification, these teams would be paired together by the means of a BLIND draw. Which means eight names go into a bucket, and are pulled at random.

After qualifying, since some of the bigger squads failed to qualify like France and Portugal (read above), FIFA decided against the blind draw and seeded the teams. Guess which teams got seeded and which got F’ed.

Results from the blind… err staged FIFA draw;

• Russia v Slovenia
• Greece v Ukraine
• Portugal v Bosnia
• Ireland v France