Just in time for the international matchdays, FIFA has released their new national rankings, from Spain all the way down to East Timor. It’s kinda like the BCS, if the BCS was devised by a cabal of drunk, corrupt, bureaucrats sitting around a table in Zurich. How are the rankings made?

It’s a simple system. Three points for a win, one for a draw. Each match is weighted from one to four. Then comes the adjustment for strength of opponent, strength of conference, date of results and home/away splits. That gives you a simple, easy to understand, number between 0 and 1643. Got it? Good.

For this month, Oklahoma Spain is the number one ranked team, which admittedly makes a good deal of sense. The rest of the list? Not so much. Bulgaria, Bulgaria is ranked 15. I dare you to name two current Bulgarian players (and good Berbatov and bad Berbatov are not two players). Hell, I dare you to name the result of a single Bulgarian match ever. Croatia is ranked sixth. I understand that they’re everyone’s darlings after the 2008 Euros, but this is supposedly an impartial set of rankings. I expect this shit out of the AP poll where every Tom, Dick and Harry from local papers around the country gets to vote (seriously? BYU above Georgia and Florida? The Tebow is not pleased), but this FIFA poll is supposed to be impartial, damnit!

As with everything else in world soccer, “impartial” means “weighted in favor of Europe” (they’re kind of like the SEC of international soccer: overrated, full of themselves and clinging to the good old days when they used to oppress blacks.) Eight of the top ten teams are European, which isn’t all that much of a problem, but 16 out of 20 is a bit much. What do you have to smoke to rank Croatia ahead of Argentina (I don’t know, but I bet you can find it in #5)? Argentina has Messi, Aguero and Tevez. Croatia has Kranjcar, Modric and hype. Strength of confederation might make sense when you look at top teams, but when your computer tells you that Scotland is better than Nigeria and Northern Ireland is better than Chile, it’s time to get a new computer. Or time to watch the actual matches…because Chile would destroy Northern Ireland like a centuries-long intractable religious feud.

In local news, the USMNT is ranked +3. Well, we’re 21st in the actual rankings, but that doesn’t matter (see above). Who’s three spots below us? Oh, those guys. In the immortal words of Tom Friedman, El Tri and their fans can “Suck. On. This.” (yep, that guy is the foreign affairs columnist for our paper of record. Evidently he subscribes to the Tamerlane-Frederick the Great school of international relations). The previous statement is especially true if Rafa Marquez’s face “sucks” on Oguchi Onyewu’s boot. Now, don’t get me wrong. The Mexican team knows that they’re not as good…that’s why whenever the two teams play, the Mexican squad tries to cheap-shot their way to victory. But now our superiority is codified in a set of completely meaningless rankings. I call that progress.

Far from meaningless are this weekend’s fixtures, most of which are World Cup qualifiers. Be prepared for an angst-filled English victory over Kazakhstan, tons of goals and no defense when Ukraine plays Croatia, cue up the Eisenstein for an irony-free encounter between Germany and Russia and remeber to drink coffee before the workman-like, terribly boring USMNT victory over Cuba.