USA supreme, France, Japan, Norway, Netherlands ascendant: sport’s evolving elite

With 12 years of unique sports stats in our databases, from 2008 to 2019 inclusive, we are now able to scan the broader horizon afforded by the quadrennial cycle, which we will call ‘quad’ for brevity. Below are the Global Cup rankings for the three quads in question: 2008-11, 2012-15 and 2016-19. Each quad includes a Summer and Winter Olympics edition, not to mention hundreds of major tournaments across the 80-plus sports we track on a regular basis.

 

Each quadrennial ranking paints a picture of national sporting performance over a significant cycle, and by comparing the various countries’ results across the quads, a clear picture emerges of how the world of sport is evolving: which are the most powerful countries, how their performance is changing over time, and which are the up-and-coming new powerhouses in world sport.

 

 * position change vs previous quad

 

In the twelve years from 2008 to 2019 included, only 14 different countries were ranked in the Global Cup top 10. Of these, nine countries were always in the top 10 in each quadrennial period: the USA, France, Russia, Great Britain, China, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia. And only two other countries ever featured in the quadrennial top 10: Spain once (2008-11), Japan twice.

 

Three other countries featured at least once in the Global Cup’s annual top 10 between 2008 and 2019 - Brazil, South Korea and the Netherlands. These 14 nations are the world’s sporting elite.

 

Compared to global nominal GDP ranking, India (44^th in GSN’s 2016-19 quad) is the only top-10 GDP country missing from GSN’s top 10, which instead includes Russia (never better than 11^th in GDP ranking).

 

The share of points won by the quadrennial rankings’ top 10 countries has always hovered around 46-47%, rising to 47.27% in 2016-19.

The share of points of the top 20 countries in the quads has been steadily increasing to 68.30% in 2016-19, when the remaining 140 countries in the table had a share of 31.7%.

 

Interestingly, while there was little change in the quadrennial top 10 from 2008-11 to 2012-15 (the first 6 countries were exactly the same), the 2016-19 quad was much more volatile, with only one country, the USA, keeping its place. More about this below.

 

The other countries that made the top 20 at least once in the quads were Sweden, Norway, Kenya, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, New Zealand and Serbia. Adding to them the other nations which featured at least once in the annual top 20 in individual years - Hungary, Argentina, Belgium, Ethiopia and Ukraine – we have that only 27 different countries were ever in the Global Cup top 20 in any one year or quad.

 

In other words, while a very high number of countries have scored GSN points over the years - 155, 160 and 160 respectively in each quad, for a total of 179 different countries between 2008 and 2019, a healthy picture of national diversity– the A listers at the world of sports’ top table form a relatively small club.

 

 

 

The last quad may have been volatile, but there’s no mistaking who sits at the top of the pile. The USA’s number of points scored and its points share have been steadily rising over the quads, with the points total in 2012-15 up by 2.4% over the previous quad, and that of 2016-19 up by 5.4%. In the last quad, the USA’s points share was 10.12%, a 0.32 positive share differential over its cumulative 2008-19 share of 9.80%.

 

Why?  The USA have been consistently scoring points in 50-plus sports each year (for comparison, Russia scored points in 45 sports in 2019), and consistently notching up way more top-8 placements than any other country in all these sports. Two arenas in particular are crucial: Ball Team sports and Aquatics, which group together some of GSN’s highest scoring sports. In Ball Team sports (the sum of 22 different disciplines including Football, Volleyball and Basketball), the USA finished 1^st, 3^rd, 2^nd and 1^st in the last quad’s four annual rankings. In Aquatics (which includes Swimming and Diving), again in the last quad’s four annual rankings, it finished 1^st, 1^st, 2^nd and 1^st. In 2016-19, Ball Team sports were worth 18.8% of all GSN points on offer, and accounted for 17.0% of all the points scored by the USA in the quad.

 

Behind the USA, the picture has been changing significantly in the course of the last quad. The top-20 countries hitting the biggest position gains in 2016-19 vs the previous quad were France (+3 places into second), Netherlands (+3) and Norway (+4). Together with Japan, the top-10 nation with the steadiest growth over the three quads (11^th in 2008-11, then 9^th, now 7^th), they are the sporting world’s emerging powerhouses, consistently performing at the highest level in a wide range of sports. France was Global Cup runner-up in 2016, 2017 and 2018; Norway clinched the Per Capita Cup title of world’s sportiest nation for a record three years in succession from 2017 to 2019; and in 2019, the Netherlands was the only country to feature both in the Global Cup and Per Capita Cup’s top-10 rankings.

 

 

The change we referred to earlier is reflected also in the results of the sporting world’s recent underachievers. There is little doubt that the impact of state-sponsored doping affected Russia, once the regular runner-up in the Global Cup, which lost this status to France in three of the last four years.  More evidence of this impact comes from Russia’s summer Olympic Games results. While 2^nd in London 2012, it was ‘only’ 6^th in Rio 2016, and the percentage of its total points won at the summer Olympics slipped from 18.7% in 2012-15 to 13.5% in 2016-19. Russia finished a very comfortable 2^nd in the first two quads, but then dropped to 3^rd in 2016-19. Only by a whisker though (8 points), and in the 2019 Global Cup it finished 2^nd, so it seems that Russia is bouncing back.

 

The same trend applies to China: the regular number three world sporting power in the first two quads, it dropped to 5^th in 2016-19, but in the 2019 Global Cup it finished 3^rd - only 128 points ahead of Great Britain. Both Russia and China could be on the way back to their former positions but, undoubtedly, they will have to fight much harder, as there are many other hungry nations competing for the top spots in the Global Cup.

 

 

Follow GSN also on Facebook and Twitter and keep up with the latest in the quest for the world’s best sporting nation!