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No. : C86233 Date: 19/01/2024 CAN Malta's national football team achieve the kind of great- ness that other 'minnows' like Iceland have claimed for them- selves? One MCAST academic believes a statistical model he has devised, could explain the crucial factors that determine a football team's FIFA rankings. The ingredients are population size, 'smallness', but also corruption perceptions in that same country. According to Dr Matthew Mus- cat Inglott's data model, systemic corruption can have a statistically significant effect on performance in international football, more specifically in small states In a paper published in the MCAST Journal of Applied Research & Practice, Muscat Inglott's complex data mod- el matches small nations' FIFA rankings, and their position in Transparency International's corruption perceptions index (CPI). FIFA rankings are based on points from wins and losses played home or away, and al- so factor the 'importance' of a match. The CPI is a measure of per- ceived public sector corrup- tion, drawn from various data sources, including surveys and public data from agencies like the World Bank and World Economic Forum: a higher CPI score denotes a cleaner coun- try in terms of corruption. But the CPI is not without its crit- ics, who question the validity of secondary data sources and its 'Westernised' bias towards de- veloped countries. In this comparison of 24 'small' states from FIFA, Malta emerges in 11th place when ranked by its FIFA points – 1,107 – and with a CPI score of 54. In comparison, top-placed Ice- land (population 372,000) – ar- guably the most successful small state having qualified for World Cup in 2018 – had 1,617 FIFA points as well as a high, or 'clean' CPI score of 74. Right below Iceland came Equatorial Guin- ea (population 1.5 million) with 1,280 FIFA points, but the Afri- can country had a bottom CPI score of 17. Indeed, European countries were more likely to have both higher FIFA points and CPI scores than countries in other re- gions. In his data model, Muscat In- glott argues that with a CPI score of 54, Malta – following the pat- tern of other similar countries – should be enjoying greater success on the football field. By plugging in Malta's population of 516,000 in his data model, the predicted tally would be 1,347 points. When he weighs down the da- ta with a factor that represents 'smallness', the tally suddenly falls back to around 1,040 points – a number close to the current reality. This equation is what convinces Muscat Inglott that his model can provide a statistical prediction for success on the football field, "just like Netflix makes predictions on what you might want to watch next." "To eventually achieve a pre- diction that is close to reality, means the factors in the model are the most important factors at play – we can say they 'explain' a significant amount of variation in the outcome being predicted," Muscat Inglott told MaltaToday, who thinks his model explains the effect of being a small nation, population size, and corruption perceptions, lowers sports per- formance. In fact, Muscat Inglott asks how Malta can score better on the field, without genuine efforts to reduce systemic corruption. For larger countries still perform better as populations increase, in spite of the adverse effects of cor- ruption on performance. "Conversely, we can say that the smaller the country is in terms of population, the more corrup- tion tends to have a negative ef- fect on their performance. This lends additional support to the central thesis that corruption has a more destructive effect on per- formance specifically in smaller countries." Muscat Inglott believes that small nations tend to be particu- larly susceptible to the negative effects of corruption on inter- national sports performance. "These findings strongly support the claim that corruption plays a greater role in determining inter- national sporting success in the case of small, as opposed to bigger countries not classified as small states. They also provide impe- tus for further research aimed at understanding what such unique factors might be." But he adds that more research is needed in other sports to ex- plore the more generalised claim that systemic corruption has a more harmful effect on inter- national sports performance in small states. "Trust is considered to be a key ingredient in authentic leader- ship in sports organisations and it is a fair assumption that where trust and transparency are lack- ing, athletes may underperform," Muscat Inglott says, referring to transparent decision-making or resource-allocation, accountabil- ity to athletes, democratic access to decision-making, equity and fair treatment of all. "There is a degree of permeabil- ity between sports organisations and the broader community, and some debate about the direction causality likely flows in terms of the spread of systemic corrup- tion... in this sense, anti-corrup- tion initiatives appear desirable at all levels." Math that explains Malta's footballing woes: smallness and corruption MCAST educator says algorithm of FIFA rankings, corruption index, and population sizes, can suggest how clean sporting culture inf luences performance