This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇯🇵 Japan leading the way in women’s baseball

• 🇹🇷 Turkey winning a world title in women’s volleyball

• 🇬🇷 Greece winning a world title in men’s water polo

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a world title in women’s water polo

• 🇵🇱 Poland winning a European title in women’s rugby sevens

• 🇫🇷 France winning a European title in men’s rugby sevens

🇯🇵 Japan lead the first edition of the women’s baseball rankings

Like softball, women’s baseball is really a two-horse race between Japan and the USA. The former is much more even, though: the two have each won three of the last six women’s softball World Cups, but Japan have held the baseball title since 2008.

Like softball, the sport currently uses a distributed World Cup format, too. Last week, the Americans did manage to steal a march on their Asian rivals: they got to play their group-stage matches for the 2027 edition of the tournament first, and closed the gap in the rankings below. Before this edition of the World Cup formally began, Japan had a ‘Rank the Nations’ rating of 9.2 — 0.4 points ahead of the USA. After five American wins by an aggregate scoreline of 102 runs to 12, that margin has halved.

Japan will have an opportunity to extend their lead again at the end of August, when they play their first five games in Taiwan. The hosts — ranked fifth above — will be the second-best team in this second qualifying group, while the sixth-ranked Philippines (5.3) and 10th-ranked Venezuela (3.8) will also be competing there. The nations in third and fourth — Canada (6.4) and Australia (6.1) — were both on the USA’s side of the draw, and qualified for the final stage next July without any real trouble.

🇹🇷 Turkey win the 2026 FIVB Women’s Volleyball Nations League

Turkey (6.2) won their second women’s VNL title over the weekend in Macau. Back in 2023, they beat China in the final; this time, it was Brazil (6.6). (Both times, Melissa Vargas — who featured in the newsletter last month — was named tournament MVP.)

Turkey were pushed hard by Brazil, only outscoring them by 99 points to 93 in total. Their earlier final-stage victories were more convincing: they beat Canada (4.8) and China (6.0) in the quarters and semis, scoring 55% of the points in those matches.

🇬🇷 Greece win the 2026 FINA Men’s Water Polo World Cup

Hosts Australia (4.3) were the only country from outside Europe to make the top eight of this year’s FINA Men’s Water Polo World Cup. They ultimately finished fourth, having beaten defending champions Spain (7.1) in a quarter-final penalty shootout.

Following a second-place finish in 2025 — their first medal at the competition in almost 20 years — Greece (6.6) took World Cup gold for the first time ever this year, beating Hungary (6.1) by a single goal in yesterday’s final.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 FINA Women’s Water Polo World Cup

The women’s World Cup ran concurrently with the men’s, and the final was between the two top-rated teams in my system: the USA (7.3) beat Spain (7.1) by 13 goals to nine. Notably, though, Spain’s semi-final opponent was Russia.

They returned to top-level competition after World Aquatics lifted their ban earlier in the year. After overturning the Netherlands (6.8) at the quarter-final stage, Russia ended up in fourth place after losing the bronze-medal game to Australia (5.9).

🇵🇱 Poland win the 2026 Rugby Europe Women’s 7s Championship Series

Every summer — after the end of World Rugby’s annual global sevens tour — Rugby Europe runs a two-leg European Championship. It’s typically an opportunity to take the sport further afield: the 2026 tournaments were held in Germany and Croatia.

On the women’s side this year, Poland lost in the final of each leg — to France (6.5) in Hamburg, and to Ireland (4.8) in Split — but two second-place finishes were still enough for them to sit at the top of the overall standings.

🇫🇷 France win the 2026 Rugby Europe Men’s 7s Championship Series

After finishing second in Hamburg, France (6.0) won the men’s edition of the Split leg yesterday — and with it the overall European series title. In second place were Italy, who haven’t competed in the World Series for over a decade.

France won despite heavily rotating from their first-choice squad: they named 23 different players in their squads across these two European events, but only five of them had played in the final event of the World Rugby calendar back in June.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇪🇸 Spain winning a world title in men’s soccer

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing South Africa’s level in age-grade rugby union

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kathy Garcia’s pick and shovel

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇪🇸 Spain win the 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup

The ‘experts’ had a pretty good FIFA World Cup. When I reviewed predictions made by the DTAI Sports Analytics Lab at KU Leuven at the outset of this edition, they had Spain, Argentina, France and England as the four most likely teams to win outright.

Those four nations were ultimately the four semi-finalists. While I wouldn’t yet rely on my basic rating system to predict match outcomes in any sport, I was pleased to see that yesterday’s two finalists — Argentina (7.7) and Spain (7.2) — were the top two teams in my first set of men’s soccer rankings, too. After a dominant performance and an eventual 1-0 win in extra time, Spain have become the first nation ever to hold both the men’s and the women’s FIFA World Cup titles simultaneously.

Along with Portugal, they are one of only two countries to have a rated team in all six versions of the game that I’m tracking for this project: both the men’s and women’s versions of the 11-a-side outdoor sport, as well as futsal and beach soccer. All six Spanish teams have a current rating of at least six out of 10 — and five are ranked inside the top four of their sport. (Men’s beach soccer — eighth — is the outlier.) No other country has a stronger active claim to be the ‘home of soccer’ than Spain.

📊 Chart of the week: Are South Africa unstoppable in age-grade rugby?

They didn’t top the first rankings I published last week, but South Africa would make a strong case that they’re the current home of men’s rugby union. To go with World Cup titles in 2019 and 2023, they’ve also had a lot of success at age-grade level.

On Saturday — while one of their top eligible players made his senior debut for the Springboks — their U20 side won a second consecutive Junior World Championship final. Can the rest of the world keep up? Actually, it’s not quite that simple. As I’ve written about men’s rugby union and rugby sevens this year, I’ve often highlighted how much more competitive these codes have become. It’s true at this level, too: weaker nations have eroded much of the margin that used to separate top U20 teams.

The chart above splits the history of the U20 JWC into two periods. From its launch in 2008 until 2019, team strength was highly variable: two top-tier nations — New Zealand and South Africa — scored more than 60% of the points in their matches, while two others had a point share below 40%. However, since restarting after a multi-year break in 2023, the competition has become much more tightly contested: over the last four editions, every elite nation is between 40% and 60% by this metric.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kathy Garcia’s pick and shovel

Some of the highlights I’ve featured in this section recently haven’t been particularly subtle ones. In this edition, though, my favourite play is one that became even more impressive the more I watched it closely.

Last week, Puerto Rico were competing in the group stages of the women’s softball World Cup. In their final game against Japan, infielder Kathy Garcia completed an out by collecting a hard-hit ground ball and transferring it to her teammate covering second base. After taking the ball on the first bounce at full stretch, Garcia doesn’t bother shifting it back to her stronger side to make a throw. From her knees, she uses her glove to shovel the ball the last few feet and beat the runner on first by a second.

You can watch a replay of this play on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPN, Jeff Passan reported on negotiations between LA28 officials, Major League Baseball and the league’s Players Association regarding the participation of top men’s talent in the next edition of the Olympic Games. Several players have publicly stated their interest, but off-field questions remain unresolved. A union adviser said: “the MLBPA is seeking fair treatment for its members in consideration for the substantial financial value they would bring to LA28.”

• For Cricinfo, S Sudarshanan contextualised India’s win over England in the one-off women’s test match at Lord’s last week. Because of a domestic calendar that reserves some time for red-ball cricket, many of the away side’s players — unlike the hosts’ — had considerable experience in the longer format of the game. After the match, England batter Heather Knight called for her own board to follow suit and provide more opportunities to develop test skills below international level.

• For Sky Sports, Adam Bate analysed the performance of Spain’s 19-year-old central defender Pau Cubarsí at this year’s men’s soccer World Cup. Along with teammate Lamine Yamal, he is one of just six teenagers in the tournament’s history to have started the final and ended up on the winning side. Cubarsí’s ability on the ball is already exceptional, but he was also part of a defensive unit that conceded only one goal in their eight games over the last five weeks.

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• ☘️ Ireland leading the way in men’s rugby union

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the possible end of Russia’s sporting exile

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Jude Bellingham’s sense of destiny

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

☘️ Ireland lead the first edition of the men’s rugby union rankings

The caption of a YouTube video published by ITV explaining men’s rugby union’s newest international competition protests: ‘We don’t have friendlies in rugby’. The Nations Championship doesn’t sit well with some of the sport’s exceptionalists, then.

The inaugural edition — which will run annually during the July and November test windows, and ostensibly imbue their fixtures with more competitive stakes than they had in the past — finally got underway two weekends ago. I’m a fan of the change for several reasons. One: we have already seen France (7.2) — firmly in the sport’s top tier, along with Ireland (7.3) and South Africa (7.1) — start to bring stronger squads with them to the Southern Hemisphere on their summer tours.

To see the impact of this new competitive structure, compare their win over Australia (3.5) this past weekend to their second fixture of the July window last year. (In both years, their first July fixture was impacted by the comparatively late finish of their domestic league season.) 12 months ago, France’s starting line-up contained players who in total had made only seven starts during the 2025 Six Nations; their team in Brisbane on Saturday combined for 20 in this year’s edition of the tournament.

📊 Chart of the week: Where is Russia’s sporting exile most notable?

The 30 team ball sports that I track for the ‘Rank the Nations’ project are overseen by 14 different official bodies, but on the question of Russia’s status in international competition they have been largely united since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The last time the country appeared in my results database was on February 14th that year, when the Russian women’s basketball team beat Puerto Rico in a FIBA World Cup Qualifying Tournament. However, the International Olympic Committee ended its formal suspension of Russia last week; in the aftermath of that decision, it will be interesting to see if this cross-code unity holds. When the news came out, I was curious: in which sports had Russian teams been performing strongly before the war?

I might have guessed that ice hockey would appear near the top of this list: the men’s side had the third-best win rate of any Russian team from July 2020 until the invasion. The two above them were more surprising. Their men’s beach soccer team won the World Cup a third time in August 2021; then, on February 6th the next year, their men came second at UEFA Futsal Euro 2022. It made me a bit uncomfortable to learn that they reached the final — mere days before the war — by beating Ukraine in the semis.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Jude Bellingham’s sense of destiny

Goals in soccer don’t always feel inevitable — but they do after Jude Bellingham has scored them. In England’s win over Norway on Saturday, it was their 23-year-old star who hunted down a rebound in extra time and swept it over the line. Who else?

In fairness, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was Erling Haaland being lauded as a ‘killer’ today, had a loose ball happened to have fallen at his feet at the right time. And herein lies the issue for English fans: crucial goals feel inevitable when they’re scored by Lionel Messi of Argentina, too. Get past their semi-final opponents, and it might be Kylian Mbappé of France waiting for them in New York. It’s a sad fact of major international tournaments that there’s never quite enough destiny to go around.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Cutback, Callum McCarthy reported on a new investment deal struck by Liga F — the organisation that oversees the top level of women’s club soccer in Spain. He views it as “a huge commercial risk”: each club that has opted in will receive an up-front cash injection, but in exchange private investors will receive a considerable share of revenue going forward. The league is now seeking bidders for its media rights, having opted out of its existing broadcast deal a season early.

• For Yahoo! Sports, Jeff Eisenberg wrote about the decision of Nikola Kusturica — a 17-year-old from Serbia — to play NCAA basketball next season instead of remaining with his EuroLeague club. He impressed in the recent FIBA U17 World Cup, scoring 37 points in a loss against the USA in the final, and some scouts consider him a contender to go first overall in the 2028 NBA Draft. How much money will he be paid in college? “[A] sizable amount," per Eisenberg’s reporting.

• For Good Areas, Jarrod Kimber covered the England women’s team’s first ever day of test cricket at Lord’s. Before last week, they had played 55 home test matches across 10 decades — but not a single one at the ground widely known as the ‘home of cricket’. Most striking to Kimber were the differences between its typical audience and the fans who travelled across London to the game on Friday: “Even before you got to the ground, it was clear this was not a normal Lord’s Test.”

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning a world title in women’s T20I cricket

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing India away from home in ODI and T20I cricket

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mario Hezonja’s fast hands

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇦🇺 Australia win the 2026 Women’s T20 World Cup

Australia’s spell without a world title didn’t last long: in the T20I cricket World Cup final at Lord’s yesterday, they comfortably beat hosts England to cap off an unbeaten seven-game run through the tournament.

England (6.8) had also won six from six ahead of the decider, but were granted a marginally easier path through the pool stage — even leaving home advantage aside. Australia (7.6) had to beat South Africa (5.6) and India (5.5) — the third- and fifth-ranked teams below — to qualify from their group, while the hosts overcame fourth-ranked New Zealand (5.6) and sixth-ranked West Indies (5.2). (According to my rating system, the two weakest teams at the World Cup — Scotland (2.8) and Ireland (2.8) — were also in England’s pool.)

Most remarkable about the performance of the eventual winners was the even spread of contributions they got from their many stars. Cricinfo — the sport’s publication of record — calculated a context-adjusted ‘impact’ score for every player in every match at this World Cup. On a per-game basis, the three highest-rated Australians — Ashleigh Gardner, Ellyse Perry and Phoebe Litchfield — sat in 21st, 22nd and 23rd place in the website’s ‘most valuable player’ rankings at the end of the tournament.

📊 Chart of the week: Do India’s cricket teams struggle away from home?

India have had plenty of good days in white-ball cricket in recent years. Last Sunday — when the men’s team lost a T20I series to Ireland for the first time, and the women were knocked out of the T20I World Cup in England — was one of the bad ones.

How much did these poor results have to do with exposure to unfamiliar conditions in a different part of the cricketing world? That specific question isn’t easy to answer. However, we can easily check whether Indian teams have performed better in general in competitive white-ball matches held closer to home. (For this analysis, I’ve grouped together all T20I and ODI tournaments organised by the ICC and hosted by India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan or Bangladesh so far in the 21st century.)

A couple of poor showings at tournaments they hosted mean that India’s women actually have a worse record in their home region than they do elsewhere. The men’s team, however, does seem to struggle a bit: their white-ball win rate drops from 80% in South Asia to 73% in other countries. It’s particularly interesting to note — given the upset on Irish soil — that their level drops most significantly in the shorter format. In ODIs, their win rate falls by about three percentage points; in T20Is, it’s almost 15.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mario Hezonja’s fast hands

Really, this section should belong to Lionel Messi. (Or Sidny Lopes Cabral.) If you’re keen on soccer, though, you’ll already be following the FIFA World Cup. Even if you’re a basketball fan, you might not be watching the ongoing FIBA World Cup qualifiers.

Mario Hezonja was a top-five NBA draft pick back in 2015 whose North American career didn’t quite pan out as hoped. The 31-year-old has been back in Europe since 2020, and still represents Croatia internationally. Against weaker opponents — like Cyprus, say, who they beat by 73 points on Friday — his talent still shines through. In one second-quarter sequence, Hezonja showed off his skills by nabbing a steal at one end of the court and whipping a one-handed overarm pass for an assist at the other.

You can watch a replay of this assist on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For Expecting Goals, Michael Caley summarised just how impressive Cape Verde were at this year’s men’s soccer World Cup. Argentina needed extra time to beat them in the first knockout round on Friday; they also held Spain to a 0-0 draw in the pool stages. It wasn’t simply a fluke of a low-scoring sport, either: “they put in performances rated just as strong as those of far more famous [footballing] nations like Croatia, Belgium and Uruguay on the underlying numbers”.

• For Stuff, Louis Herman-Watt spoke to the parents of Anton Segner, a 24-year-old born in Germany who has just been called up to New Zealand’s national rugby union team for the first time. After interacting with Kiwi coaches at home in Frankfurt, he emigrated at 15 to finish his education there. “[T]here was no chance to stop him,” his father said. “First you think, ‘okay that's a weird idea’, and then you start working on it, and then ‘okay, we understand it's your big dream’.”

• For CNBC, Alex Sherman reported on the Premier Lacrosse League’s expansion plans after the competition announced last week that it had raised another $100mn from investors. Its co-founder hopes that the 2028 Olympics in the USA will increase public interest in the league, and they intend to open up franchises to private ownership in the next few years. International teams will play a modified ‘sixes’ format in Los Angeles, while PLL teams play traditional field lacrosse.

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇩🇪 Germany winning a world title in men’s beach handball

• 🇦🇷 Argentina winning a world title in women’s beach handball

• 🇧🇪 Belgium winning a world title in men’s field hockey

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands winning a world title in women’s field hockey

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the USA’s level in age-grade men’s basketball

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Melissa Vargas’ emphatic spike

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇩🇪 Germany win the 2026 Men’s Beach Handball World Championship

Have you ever been watching a sport like soccer and thought: ‘that goal was so good it should count twice?’ You might enjoy beach handball. Right there in the rulebook is the provision that two points are to be awarded for ‘creative or spectacular goals’.

Fans of sweeping national stereotypes will therefore be delighted to see Brazil (7.0) at the top of the first set of men’s rankings below; even as the Seleção fail to win many admirers at the FIFA World Cup, o jogo bonito seems to survive elsewhere. You might also think it’s fitting that they’ve assumed this position despite coming up short in major tournaments over the last five years: to go with two bronze medals at the World Games, they have finishes of third and second at the World Championship.

That silver medal was awarded just yesterday, having lost the final of the 2026 World Championship to Germany (6.3) in fairly convincing fashion. This year’s winners have comfortably the best record of any team other than Brazil; beneath them, a group of four European teams are bunched tightly together. Argentina (4.9) only rank 10th overall at present, but might be on the rise: they beat hosts Croatia (5.9) yesterday to claim bronze and secure their best World Championship finish.

🇦🇷 Argentina win the 2026 Women’s Beach Handball World Championship

In women’s beach handball, there’s little doubt that Argentina (6.4) are on the rise: their World Championship gold yesterday followed a silver at the previous edition in 2024, and a first-place finish at last year’s World Games.

The South Americans are currently fourth in the women’s rankings. Their standing is impressive given their lack of pedigree in the sport’s more popular sibling: they’re the only top-six nation which doesn’t also qualify for a rating in women’s indoor handball.

🇧🇪 Belgium win the 2025-26 Men’s FIH Pro League

As well as taking them to an overall victory in this year’s edition of the Pro League, the performances of Belgium (6.5) over the last few months have closed the gap on the Netherlands (6.8) at the top of my men’s field hockey ratings.

An interesting quirk of this Dutch team: they fared unusually poorly in shootouts. During 2025-26, they lost the decider in all five of the games they drew in normal time; just a season earlier, they had won seven Pro League shootouts out of seven.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands win the 2025-26 Women’s FIH Pro League

A shootout loss to Australia (5.3) on Saturday was the only blemish on the Women’s Pro League record of the Netherlands (8.7); they won their other 14 games in normal time, and finished far ahead of the competition at the top of the standings.

They were particularly impressive in attack, scoring 56 goals in total — 25 more than the next-most prolific team. Yibbi Jansen led the overall scoring chart with 15 herself, all from penalty corners; teammate Pien Dicke was the top scorer from open play.

📊 Chart of the week: Is the USA’s lead in men’s basketball really eroding?

Once again in 2026, the NBA’s MVP award was won by someone brought up outside the USA. While it’s been eight years since the best player in men’s basketball was an American, the country’s development pipeline is clearly still bursting with talent.

Don’t believe me? Look at their results in recent age-grade tournaments. At the 2024 U17 World Cup, the USA recorded their best performance ever: they won their games by 64 points, on average. Several players from that class — those born during 2007, including last week’s top NBA draft pick AJ Dybantsa — then went on to lead their country to an U19 World Cup win in 2025. This year’s U17 crop have started well, too: so far in 2026, they’ve won their two games by a combined total of 93 points.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Melissa Vargas’ emphatic spike

Sometimes you spot an athlete and know immediately that you’ll get a lot of joy out of watching them perform. That was my feeling with Nahid Rana — highlighted in this space a couple of weeks ago — and it’s the case with Melissa Vargas, too.

For starters, Vargas has a fascinating story: she first played volleyball for Cuba at 13, but emigrated later in her teens after a dispute with the governing body. She became eligible for Turkey in 2023, and has led them to several medals since. However, the 26-year-old is also just a jaw-dropping athlete: she combines a 1.94m frame with an explosive leap and tidy ball skills. One successful third-set spike against China in the VNL last week stuck with me for a while; all I can suggest is that you watch it, too.

You can watch a replay of this point on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Observer, Cameron Ponsonby wrote about the recent success of New Zealand in men’s test cricket, despite having the smallest population of any nation playing the format. One choice made by the governing body has been to prioritise foreign exposure: in 2018, they shifted funding from the domestic red-ball competition to development tours overseas. As a former coach put it: "[w]e are giving a large number of players international experience at different levels”.

• For The Guardian, Sid Lowe reported on the plight of Uruguay manager Marcelo Bielsa before his team were knocked out of the men’s soccer World Cup on Saturday. Several players had complained about how he had treated them in private, and his public comments ahead of their final pool game were withering. Contrasting himself to Spain coach Luis de la Fuente, he said: “the reality is that his football is much more beautiful than what I’ve managed with my team”.

• For MLB.com, Jesse Borek covered an eye-catching hitting display from Rintaro Sasaki at the league’s draft combine. In an unusual move for a top baseball prospect, he left Japan in 2024 — after breaking the high-school home-run record — to go to college in the USA. Now 21, Sasaki has had only limited success at NCAA level: he was a roughly average hitter this year, and “could potentially land anywhere from the [seventh] to the 12th round” of the 2026 draft.

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇺🇸 The USA leading the way in women’s softball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing ball-in-play trends in international volleyball

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Nahid Rana’s high heat

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇺🇸 The USA lead the first edition of the women’s softball rankings

The distributed World Cup format — where a number of nations host pool-stage games several months before knockouts take place — is more common than I realised before I started following international sport more systematically for this newsletter.

That’s why — in this edition — I’m able to a write a sentence like ‘the 2027 Women’s Softball World Cup starts this week’ and not expect emails of correction in response. Group A matches in the latest edition of the global tournament begin in the Czech Republic tomorrow; Group B — hosted by Peru, but headlined by reigning champions Japan — will take place next month, and Group C is scheduled for September in the USA. The Americans currently top my ratings, but not the official WBSC rankings.

When we do eventually get to the knockout stages, don’t be surprised if it comes down to an elimination game between the USA (9.2) and Japan (9.0). While the Americans lost the last World Cup final to their rivals, they’ve had a slight advantage at the World Games: they won both the gold-medal game in 2022 and their semi-final in 2025 by a single run. Taiwan (6.8) — competing in Group A — are another team to watch: they have four top-three finishes at major tournaments in the last five years.

📊 Chart of the week: Does volleyball have its own ball-in-play crisis?

I think it’s fair to say that ‘ball-in-play time’ is a concept that’s garnering more media attention than it used to — not just in Premier League soccer, where conversation on the topic really took off this season, but in many team ball sports.

Even a game of discrete events like volleyball is having its own version of this ‘crisis’. In both of last year’s Nations League competitions, the percentage of match time that the ball spent in play decreased, according to the most recent edition of the global governing body’s annual technical report. On the men’s side, per the FIVB, this figure dropped from 14.5% in 2024 to 12.2% in 2025; there’s still more ball-in-play time on the women’s side, but theirs also fell by a couple of percentage points last year.

The main culprit was the system for challenging line calls. There were more calls than ever challenged by teams in 2025 — and the amount of time each review lasted was longer on average, too. What’s been done in response? It’s simple, really: for the 2026 Nations League, the FIVB has changed some rules to streamline the process and speed games up. I’m always pleased to see proactive administrators in circumstances like this; it remains to be seen if the Premier League will take similar action.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Nahid Rana’s high heat

Key to Bangladesh’s first win over Australia in men’s ODI cricket for 21 years last Tuesday was the fast bowling of Nahid Rana. The right-armer claimed four wickets in the match; each of them came on balls delivered quicker than 146 kph.

High pace alone is difficult to deal with, but pace paired with consistent accuracy leaves batters with few good options. When Australian debutant Liam Scott faced his fourth ball of the match, his team’s hopes of victory were already fairly slim. After a short ball from Rana reared up towards his ribs and he parried it to a diving catcher, they had practically vanished. The appreciation of subtlety has its place in analysis of elite sport, but sometimes it’s hard to look past the most obvious of an athlete’s skills.

You can watch a replay of this wicket on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• On Substack, Neil Paine compared the current iteration of Brazil’s men’s soccer team to its predecessors. While their title odds for this World Cup are historically low — they drew their first pool game against Morocco on Saturday — their overall performance level hasn’t dropped off as much as you might think: “they mostly have had a stable winning percentage across the many decades since their rise, even during the comparatively less successful recent period”.

• For the Sporting News, Stephen Noh reported on the widespread popularity of basketball in the Philippines. The country is “the NBA’s No. 3 market”, according to Noh, and both teams in this year’s Finals had a player of Filipino heritage on their roster. “You go to anywhere that’s middle income or below, you will see a makeshift basketball court,” a local journalist said. “Even if they don’t have basketball shoes, people play in their flip flops.”

• For the Sydney Morning Herald, Iain Payten spoke to Maddison Levi — star of the Australia women’s rugby sevens team — about her surprisingly fast return from injury for the final event of this year’s World Series. Having torn a knee ligament eight days earlier, Levi came back for the end of the knockout stage in Bordeaux — and didn’t seem to do herself any more damage: “I played the last two games, and now I’m here back in the knee brace again, to help with the recovery.”

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇿🇦 South Africa winning a world title in men’s rugby sevens

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning a world title in women’s rugby sevens

• 🇱🇻 Latvia winning a world title in men’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a world title in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the favourites for the men’s soccer World Cup

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Sydney Schertenleib’s frozen rope

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇿🇦 South Africa win the 2026 Men’s SVNS World Championship

I’d argue that World Rugby has overseen a real levelling of the competitive playing field in the sports it oversees — on the men’s side, at least — since rugby union turned professional during the 1990s.

I’ve written previously in this newsletter about how the gap between European nations and the traditional Southern Hemisphere powers has closed in the 15-a-side version of the sport; look at men’s rugby sevens, too, and there is clear evidence of the top nations’ advantages being competed away in recent decades. Eight of the first nine World Series titles between 2000 and 2008 were won by New Zealand; over the last nine editions of the year-long competition, five different teams have finished on top.

It’s also clear enough in the ‘Rank the Nations’ ratings: the three top-ranked nations at the conclusion of the latest edition of the World Series — Argentina (6.6), Fiji (6.6) and New Zealand (6.5) — are almost inseparable, while the World Championship title was actually won by South Africa (6.1), currently ranked fourth. Argentina are a real success story here: they finished in the top four of the overall ladder only once between 2000 and 2008, but have four such finishes in the last five seasons alone.

🇦🇺 Australia win the 2026 Women’s SVNS World Championship

Australia (7.9) peaked at the right time during the 2025-26 women’s rugby sevens season, winning two of the three postseason World Series events to pip New Zealand (8.5) to the overall World Championship title.

Their recent record still isn’t as strong as the Kiwis’, whether you look at it over five years or a shorter stretch of time. So far in 2026, Australia have scored 69% of the points in their matches; New Zealand’s point share remains notably higher at 76%.

🇱🇻 Latvia win the 2026 FIBA Men’s 3x3 World Cup

Latvia (6.5) beat Germany (5.0) in the final of the men’s 3x3 basketball World Cup yesterday, finally adding a gold medal at the competition to their previous silver (in 2019) and bronze (in 2023).

Their opponents are on an upward trajectory, though. Silver this year followed a fourth-place World Cup finish in 2025; they were also fourth in last year’s Europe Cup. Prior to 2025, Germany had never finished higher than ninth in either tournament.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 FIBA Women’s 3x3 World Cup

The final of the women’s 3x3 tournament — which ran alongside the men’s in Poland — was contested by the USA (7.1) and Australia (6.6). They were the two top-ranked nations in the sport entering the World Cup, and remain so at its conclusion.

The USA took the title with a 21-20 victory, backing up a 21-18 pool-stage win over the same opponents. In the semi-finals, however, the Americans did need overtime to beat Azerbaijan (5.1), who knocked them out of the Champions Cup in March.

📊 Chart of the week: Who’s flying under the radar at the FIFA World Cup?

Last week, I linked to some men’s soccer World Cup predictions made by the DTAI Sports Analytics Lab at KU Leuven. What do we learn by comparing their forecast to the public’s predictions? (Pew surveyed 3,507 Americans back in March.)

Let’s first dispense with some bias in favour of two of the hosts; both Mexico and the USA are among the nine contenders named in the Pew survey, but don’t appear as high on the DTAI Lab’s list. Conversely, two teams not singled out by the public are among the experts’ top nine: the Netherlands — who, per the DTAI Lab, have the seventh-best chance of winning the World Cup outright — and Colombia. The latter face Portugal on June 27th; it could be one of the better games of the pool stages.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Sydney Schertenleib’s frozen rope

Spain’s win over England on Friday — part of the latest set of UEFA qualifiers for the next women’s soccer World Cup — was a reminder to Barcelona fans of what they have just lost: it was powered by two goals from departing superstar Alexia Putellas.

Across Europe that same evening, however, were glimpses into the club’s future. Kika Nazareth scored twice for Portugal in a win over Latvia; the pick of the goals from Barça players, though, came from the right foot of Switzerland midfielder Sydney Schertenleib. Early against Malta, the 19-year-old won possession near halfway with her back to goal. She turned, carried the ball forward until she was a couple of paces outside the box and arrowed the ball towards the top corner with effortless power.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPNCricinfo, Hemant Brar reported on Afghanistan’s hopes of more regular exposure to top competition in men’s test cricket. This week’s match in India is only their 13th since 2018, and they’re yet to play against most of the sport’s other top nations. Their board is trying to force top players to spend more time in red-ball cricket by limiting how much they play in shorter formats. An assistant coach of the team said: “We want them to respect and play our domestic cricket".

• For Yahoo! Sports, Jack Baer covered the latest update from the commissioner of the NBA on the league’s planned launch of an affiliated franchise competition for men’s basketball in Europe. The league is pitching ‘NBA Europe’ — currently expected to launch in 2027 — as a 16-team competition; some participants will be existing professional clubs, and some will be “groups who…want to launch teams in cities that don't have top-level basketball right now”.

• For Fangraphs, Jay Jaffe described the technical changes made by Roki Sasaki and the Los Angeles Dodgers at the start of his second season pitching in MLB. The 24-year-old — who represented Japan in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, but opted out of this year’s edition — had been performing at a much lower level than expected after moving to the USA; in recent weeks, however, his outings have improved on the back of “better command and [a] reconfigured repertoire”.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇵🇱 Poland leading the way in men’s volleyball

• 🇮🇹 Italy leading the way in women’s volleyball

• 🇫🇮 Finland winning a world title in men’s ice hockey

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the global popularity of test cricket

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Ivar Stenberg’s show-stopper

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇵🇱 Poland lead the first edition of the men’s volleyball ratings

Volleyball — the indoor version, that is — was the only ‘net sport’ to make the cut for this project. (As an aside: I’ve not included beach volleyball, as it’s contested by pairs of players rather than ‘national teams’ — even at events like the Olympic Games.)

The nature of these sports is such that top competitors can squeeze an exceptionally high win rate out of a seemingly small advantage at the level of individual points. So it is with Poland (6.7), who are the dominant team in men’s international volleyball at present. They have won just 53% of their points in competitive play since 2022 — but 82% of their matches. That’s been enough to bring in a tidy haul of medals during this period: two Nations League golds and an Olympic silver, among several others.

Second-ranked Italy (6.5) have won points at a similar rate to their rivals, but have fewer outright wins to show for it. The result of this trend is a serious squeeze in the middle of the pack. 20 nations have played enough men’s volleyball matches over the last five years to qualify for the rankings above; 17 of those 20 teams have won between 48% and 52% of their competitive points since 2022, and currently have a ‘Rank the Nations’ rating between 4.0 and 6.0.

🇮🇹 Italy lead the first edition of the women’s volleyball ratings

Women’s volleyball is a little more dispersed than the men’s game: top-ranked Italy (7.0) have won 54% of their points since 2022. They currently hold three major global trophies: Olympic gold, the World Championship and the Nations League title.

When the 2026 edition begins this week, in fact, they’ll be seeking their fourth Nations League title in five years. Last year’s losing finalists Brazil (6.7) are one of Italy’s closest challengers, along with China (6.3), the USA (6.1) and Turkey (6.1).

🇫🇮 Finland win the 2026 Men’s Ice Hockey World Championship

Host nation Switzerland (5.7) had a dominant run through this year’s Men’s Worlds, winning their first nine games of the tournament by 48 goals to eight in aggregate. In yesterday’s final, however, they lost 0-1 to Finland (5.9) in sudden-death overtime.

The third-place playoff also went against recent form, as Canada (7.2) — who went unbeaten in pool play — lost 2-3 to Norway (3.9). The Nordic country’s bronze medal represents their best-ever finish in a major men’s ice hockey competition.

📊 Chart of the week: Is test cricket really that unpopular?

One sport I was surprised not to see near the top of my ‘popularity score’ rankings a few weeks ago: test cricket. That list drew on Google Trends data; to investigate further, I plotted search activity for ‘cricket’ in general — leaving formats aside.

As the chart indicates, peak interest is driven by the flagship event in men’s ODI cricket: the 50-over World Cup, which takes place every four years. The World Test Championship was instituted in 2019 to provide men’s test cricket with a better competitive structure and more context for casual followers, but it doesn’t yet appear to have captured their imagination; the latest final — contested by Australia and South Africa at Lord’s during June 2025 — barely registers in the data above.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Ivar Stenberg’s show-stopper

I try to spread out my coverage across different sports each week, and we’ve already briefly covered the latest in men’s international ice hockey. However, Ivar Stenberg’s goal for Sweden against Slovakia last Tuesday stopped me in my tracks.

The 18-year-old will be one of the top selections in this year’s NHL Draft. His skating isn’t rated that highly by scouts, but he showed real poise after carrying the puck across the blue line in the second period. The forward first angled his body towards the centre of the offensive zone; then, when the Slovak defender trailing him turned his shoulders inwards, he swivelled back into open space on his forehand side. His “high-end” shot — per The Athletic’s draft guide, at least — took care of the rest.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• On their blog, Jesse Davis and Pieter Robberechts of the DTAI Sports Analytics Lab at KU Leuven published their predictions for the upcoming men’s soccer World Cup. No team has a better than one-in-four chance of winning the tournament outright, but Spain are the academics’ current favourites: according to their model, the winners of the 2024 European Championship have “the strongest offense and second best defense in the tournament”.

• For the Sydney Morning Herald, Christian Nicolussi reported on the impact of the major changes to player eligibility instituted for the first time in this year’s men’s rugby league ‘State of Origin’ series in Australia. Players who represent other ‘tier one’ teams — New Zealand and England — in international competition are no longer barred from playing in Origin. Of those picked for last week’s series opener, “up to 15…could take on host nation Australia at this year’s World Cup”.

• For his newsletter, Simon Blanford analysed how often the top nations in women’s field hockey score goals in different team-strength scenarios. During what he calls ‘unbalanced play’, the scoring rate of the ‘numbers-up’ team does increase, but the opposite effect is more pronounced. “[T]here is a general decline in goal scoring when a team loses a player…falling from about 3.5 goals a game to less than one. Effectively teams do not score when they lose a player to a card.”

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇦🇺 Australia leading the way in women’s ODI cricket

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England winning a European title in women’s rugby union

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the history of men’s rugby league in Australia

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: John Tavares’ tournament opener

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇦🇺 Australia lead the first edition of the women’s ODI cricket ratings

For the first time since 2018, Australia don’t currently hold the World Cup in either white-ball format of women’s cricket: neither T20Is nor ODIs. They’ll have a chance to regain the T20 World Cup this July, but it will be a longer wait in the 50-over game.

Last year’s ODI World Cup was a seminal moment, as India — a modern powerhouse of men’s cricket, at least in its white-ball formats — won their first major trophy in the women’s game. According to my rankings, however, it’s too early to declare a true shift in the balance of power in ODI cricket. Taking all competitive fixtures over the last five years into consideration, Australia (7.5) are still rated much higher than any other team. India (6.1) do sneak into second place, just ahead of England.

Also included in these ratings are fixtures in the ICC Women’s Championship; over a multi-year period, a set number of bilateral series between top-ranked teams count towards the IWC table. (England just hosted New Zealand in one such series.) Australia have won all three editions so far, and 88% of their IWC matches in total since 2014. No other team has won more than 65% of their fixtures during this period; when that gap begins to close, I’ll start to question whether the Aussies are still on top.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England win the 2026 Women’s Six Nations Championship

England (8.9) won their eighth consecutive European title in women’s rugby union yesterday, convincingly beating their main rivals in the competition away from home. France (6.8) have now finished second overall in seven Six Nations in a row.

How are England trending? At the end of last year, they had a 9.0 rating — so their level has actually dropped a little. Compared to 2025, other Six Nations teams scored one point per game more against them this year — and conceded three points fewer.

📊 Chart of the week: Who’s on top of men’s rugby league in Australia?

I’ve not written much about international rugby league so far this year. In fact, the highest representative honour in the sport might be selection for Australia’s ‘State of Origin’ series; per Google, global search interest is higher than it is for the World Cup.

So — ahead of this year’s men’s Origin series kicking off next week — I’m cheating a bit in this edition. What would applying the methodology of ‘Rank the Nations’ to the history of rugby league matches between New South Wales and Queensland reveal? Entering 2026, the two states are almost neck and neck. While Queensland have won eight of 15 matches over the last five years, NSW remain marginally ahead as a result of scoreline dominance in their wins: all seven have come by 10 points or more.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: John Tavares’ tournament opener

One potential first-overall NHL Draft selection — 18-year-old wing Gavin McKenna — ultimately chose not to play in the men’s ice hockey World Championship this month. Still, top picks have been the centre of attention for Canada at this year’s tournament.

Macklin Celebrini (picked first in 2024) made headlines after being named captain at 19. That decision became more striking when national-team legend Sidney Crosby (2005) joined their roster late — and didn’t take his ‘C’ back from Celebrini. When the action began, however, it was John Tavares (2009) who entered the spotlight. After a teammate brought the puck up the ice early in their first game against Sweden, he broke towards the net at just the right time to receive a pass and bury a great chance.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPNCricinfo, Osman Samiuddin contextualised Pakistan’s state of precarity in men’s test cricket after losing to Bangladesh on Monday. In his view, “on-field results feel more than ever like they're catching up to the continuing degradation in the way the game is run off it”: the national governing body — currently helmed by a sitting government minister — is burning through both chairs and head coaches, and “no annual financial statement has been made public since 2023”.

• For WNBA.com, Brian Martin covered the influx of talent from overseas into the top women’s basketball league in North America. After it expanded to 15 teams for the 2026 season, a record 51 players born outside the USA have appeared on a WNBA court already this year. That number is likely to grow as the season progresses: “several players still fulfilling overseas commitments” are contracted to franchises and expected to join up with them over the next few months.

• For ESPN, Sam Marsden reported on Spain’s attempts to persuade Lionel Messi to represent them — and not Argentina — in men’s international soccer during the early 2000s. Their intent set off a mad scramble inside the Argentine Football Association, culminating in an age-grade friendly being arranged to capture his eligibility. A local journalist recounts: “For [his] first Argentina call-up, the AFA sent the fax to Barcelona with his name misspelled, written ‘LEONEL MECCI’.”

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇧🇷 Brazil leading the way in men’s beach soccer

• 🇪🇸 Spain leading the way in women’s beach soccer

• 🇸🇪 Sweden winning a European title in men’s ice hockey

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing Pakistan’s history in men’s test cricket

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Aoife Wafer’s backdoor flip

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇧🇷 Brazil lead the first edition of the men’s beach soccer ratings

Is any sport more likely to be impacted by climate change than beach soccer? Its global growth is already being hampered: an invitational tournament set to take place in Ghana over the weekend was postponed because of coastal erosion at the venue.

The loss of coastline to rising sea levels looms over the sport in Europe, too. The next edition of the Euro Beach Soccer League begins soon in Andalusia; in the southern region of Spain, local government projects that the area around Cádiz — where the first stage of the event will be held — could be particularly badly affected by erosion. The hosts haven’t been particularly strong in the men’s version of the sport over the last few years: they fall just outside a top six populated by only three European teams.

Brazil (8.1) have won the last two editions of the men’s beach soccer World Cup in 2024 and 2025, and currently top the ‘Rank the Nations’ ratings. However, Iran (8.1) are right there with them — only sliding into second place as a result of having won a slightly lower share of their matches over the last five years. Their record has been buoyed by dominant play in the Asia Cup, but they’ve also put in solid performances at the World Cup: they exited in the quarter-finals last time, but finished third in 2024.

🇪🇸 Spain lead the first edition of the women’s beach soccer ratings

At the moment, there’s much less geographical diversity at the top of women’s beach soccer. Despite lobbying from within the sport, no women’s World Cup has yet been established — and FIFA appears to have no plans for this to change any time soon.

The first edition of the women’s Euro Beach Soccer League was in 2021, and Spain (8.1) have been the strongest nation in competitive play since then: they won titles in 2022 and 2023, placed third in 2024 and were runners-up to Portugal (6.6) in 2025.

🇸🇪 Sweden win the men’s Euro Hockey Tour 2025-26

Sweden (6.6) were the comfortable overall winners of this year’s edition of the Euro Hockey Tour — a series of tournaments contested by them and three of the other top men’s ice hockey teams in Europe each season.

They added seven NHL players to their roster ahead of the Men’s Worlds, but their final three Tour matches — all at home — were a mixed bag. A win over Switzerland (5.3) was bracketed by losses to the Czech Republic (5.8) and Finland (5.7).

📊 Chart of the week: Has test cricket left Pakistan behind?

Pakistan are back in action in men’s test cricket: they began a tour of Bangladesh last Friday. At a glance, their performances over time seem remarkably consistent; look closer, however, and they show just how much the sport has changed.

Between 1974 and 1999, Pakistan won 32% of their matches against top opposition outright; during the next 26 years, they recorded a virtually identical win rate. Due to a dwindling number of draws, however, test wins aren’t worth as much as they used to be: of the eight nations plotted above, five have improved their win rate by at least 10 percentage points since 2000. The West Indies — one of the sport’s great powers during the 20th century — are the only other team not to improve by this metric.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Aoife Wafer’s backdoor flip

For those unfamiliar with rugby union, the British and Irish Lions — a composite team of top men’s players from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland that tours the southern hemisphere every four years — probably seems like an odd concept.

Launching a women’s team might seem even odder. Given England’s dominance of the sport, I’ll be surprised if next year’s tour of New Zealand is anything but a whitewash. Will the Lions just field 15 players from one nation, though? Not if Aoife Wafer has anything to do with it. The young forward was Player of the Championship in the 2025 Six Nations, and has starred again this year: against Wales on Saturday, a neat offload to assist Ireland’s second try was the highlight of another strong display.

You can watch a replay of this assist on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For the Sydney Morning Herald, Chris Barrett reported on Australia’s plans to make the new NRL team based in Papua New Guinea even more attractive to top men’s rugby league talent. The national government is financially supporting its Pacific neighbour in order to counter China’s influence in the region. They were already exempt from local taxes, but changes will now be made to legislation to ensure that players will not be “assessed as Australian residents for tax purposes”.

• For Elite Prospects, Sean Shapiro wrote about the decline of the USA U18 men’s ice hockey team. Despite operating a National Team Development Program “purpose-built to win titles” at that age-grade, the team has claimed gold only once at the last eight World Championships. Altered NCAA eligibility rules mean that Canada’s junior system is now an option for U18 talent; Per Shapiro, “some 2010-born players who were high on the NTDP list opted for CHL futures instead”.

• For his newsletter, Joey D’Urso visited the construction site that will become the Hassan II Stadium in Morocco. By the time the North African country hosts the men’s soccer World Cup in 2030 — with Spain and Portugal — it will be one of the world’s largest stadiums. According to D’Urso, it’s all part of a wider political project: “Morocco wants to kickstart rapid economic growth, increase revenue from tourism, and become a regional power in the mould of the Gulf states”.

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing Poland’s potential in women’s soccer

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Cohen Norrie’s change of pace

• 💭 Lots of other interesting things I learned

📊 Chart of the week: Are Poland on the rise in women’s soccer?

The finals of the 2026 UEFA Women’s U17 Euros kick off in Northern Ireland later today. What can we learn about soccer by analysing recent results at this age grade? Among the eight qualified nations, it’s Poland’s improvement that really stands out.

Led by Ewa Pajor, the country did win the U17 Euros outright in 2012-13; they didn’t build on that success when the format was expanded the next year, though. Between 2013-14 and 2018-19, Poland scored only 43% of the goals in their matches in the competition. Since its post-pandemic resumption in 2021-22, however, that figure has jumped to 70%. Euro 2025 was the first major tournament their senior women’s team had ever qualified for; based on these numbers, I don’t think it’ll be the last.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Cohen Norrie’s change of pace

Further to last week’s discussion of New Zealand’s fortunes in rugby union: it’s worth adding that — despite the fact that I’m not a Kiwi — I’m far from a neutral observer. Turning over my YouTube watch history would prove as much.

The ‘All Blacks’ channel regularly publishes compilations of every test try scored by some of the team’s most notable players, and I rarely scroll past one without watching. Having seen some of those recently featured come through age-grade rugby, I often wonder who might be next. Could it be Cohen Norrie? Last Monday, he scored twice for New Zealand U20 against Australia. Both were slick finishes, but for the second he produced a ‘stop-and-go’ move worthy of a seasoned international.

You can watch a replay of this try on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPNCricinfo, Andrew Miller interviewed Asa Tribe — who has already played ODI and T20I cricket for Jersey — about the prospect of representing England in test cricket this coming summer. The 22-year-old batter’s swift rise through the English domestic system has been accelerated by a number of stints playing overseas. Tribe told Miller: “it’s a 12-month sport now, so you can get in the habit of going, and going, and going, without actually processing what’s happened”.

• For The Athletic, Stephen J. Nesbitt and Sam Blum reported on how MLB teams manage the off-field transition of baseball players who move from Japan to the USA. Some are more prepared than others; one recent free agent visited a team and “noted the home clubhouse had no bidets”. The transition might also be easier in the other direction, per one former pro: “I think it’s a lot easier for foreign players to go to Japan than it is for Japanese players to come to the [USA].”

• For Yahoo! Sports, Madeline Kenney wrote about the return of Han Xu to the New York Liberty for the 2026 WNBA season. The 26-year-old from China last played basketball in the W in 2023, and has grown two inches — to 6ft 11in — in her time away. Over that period, she had a successful stint in Australia’s WNBL. Liberty head coach Chris DeMarco was positive about her recent development: “credit to her for improving the way she has since she’s been here last”.

• For TSN, Darren Dreger reported that 18-year-old NHL Draft prospect Gavin McKenna will represent Canada at the men’s ice hockey World Championship later this month. The forward spent his final year of pre-draft eligibility playing at NCAA level in the USA, instead of continuing in Canada’s junior system. Also committed is Macklin Celebrini, the 19-year-old who stood out at February’s Olympics; many other stars are unavailable due to the ongoing NHL postseason.

• For The Times, Elgan Alderman investigated what NRL investment in Super League could mean for rugby league in England. The competition makes much less money than its equivalent in Australia, and some clubs feel a deal would be a step towards financial sustainability. A calendar revamp is also possible. “The NRL taking over Super League may actually bring rugby league into the globalised world that it’s not really been part of,” says historian Tony Collins.

• For The Guardian, Matt Hughes examined how lucrative this year’s men’s soccer World Cup will be for FIFA. They project that revenue from this cycle will be 73% higher than the four years leading up to 2022. However, the hosts — Canada, the USA and Mexico — will receive a smaller share than they did the last time it was held in North America. “In 1994 FIFA retained the international marketing and TV rights, and then turned everything over to us,” said a former US Soccer executive.

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇿 New Zealand winning a regional title in women’s rugby union

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the global popularity of volleyball

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Manon Errard’s enviable athleticism

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇳🇿 New Zealand win the 2026 Pacific Four Series

2026 began in an unfamiliar way for New Zealanders: for the first time this century, their country didn’t hold either the men’s or the women’s rugby union World Cup on January 1st. Is their influence on the sport waning? It depends on your point of view.

Among the four versions of the game overseen by World Rugby, New Zealand are the top-rated team in only one — women’s rugby sevens — at present. However, they still produce the widest range of talent: France and Australia are the only two other nations to qualify for ratings in all four codes, and just one of their eight teams currently outranks their Kiwi rivals. After winning the Pacific Four at the weekend, things are on the up for New Zealand (7.6) in women’s 15-a-side rugby union, too.

They have a long way to go to catch England (9.0) at the top, but three wins from three this month cemented their position as the second-best team in the sport. Canada (6.8) were the other major contenders in their regional tournament, having beaten New Zealand convincingly in last year’s World Cup semi-final, but the Black Ferns got their revenge in the second round last week. On Saturday, they beat Australia (3.1) by 35 points to finish the job and retain their title in convincing fashion.

📊 Chart of the week: Is volleyball really that popular?

In quieter weeks for the newsletter so far this year, I’ve been trying to come up with a fair way to condense and summarise a nation’s overall performance level across the 30 team ball sports that I’m following for the ‘Rank the Nations’ project.

One question I’m grappling with is how to weight each of those 30 sports against each other; it feels right for me to give a country more credit for an excellent team in a globally popular game than one in a more niche pursuit. How do you create a framework to apply this sort of judgement consistently? I’ve started by comparing interest in each sport according to Google Trends. The data point I’ve been most surprised by in my first set of popularity rankings: volleyball’s presence near the top.

I don’t know if I buy the governing body’s claim that volleyball is ‘the fourth most popular sport in the world’, but something real is being captured here. For instance, in Brazil — a market of more than 200 million people — it’s much more popular than in most English-speaking countries. Per the FIVB, 16% of the country’s TV audience tuned in to watch the 2025 Nations League, and one match in the competition was “the second most-watched sports broadcast of the year outside [soccer]”.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Manon Errard’s enviable athleticism

Maybe it’s because I’m recovering from a torn Achilles — mixed netball, if you have to know — or maybe the sport just plays well on social media. Either way, I’m captivated by the athleticism of the handball players who keep appearing on my Instagram feed.

One recent highlight really captures the sport’s unique appeal. During a recent European Championship qualifier, France winger Manon Errard was unmarked in the right-hand corner. After one of her teammates finds her with a short bounce-pass, the 21-year-old moves towards the centre of the court to create a better angle for her left-handed shot. Errard then springs off her right foot, hangs in the air and changes her arm slot in one fluid motion before sending the ball past the goalie’s flailing limbs.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Guardian, Nick Ames reported on plans to change the qualifying process for men’s soccer’s European Championship. UEFA members are weighing up moving to a structure based on the continent’s Nations League that “would satisfy demand for games between the leading countries”, instituting the ‘Swiss model’ used by the Champions League or retaining the status quo. If either new option is preferred, per Ames, it’s “unlikely to be in place” in time for Euro 2028.

• For ESPNCricinfo, Valkerie Baynes interviewed England women’s head coach Charlotte Edwards about her team’s preparation for the T20I cricket World Cup. (England will host the next edition of the tournament in June.) Unlike rivals, they have not played any competitive fixtures in this format since the conclusion of the ODI World Cup in October; instead, Edwards led “a 30-strong party…to Pretoria last month for training and a series of intra-squad T20 practice matches”.

• For MLB.com, Mike Petriello looked into whether 2026 might turn out to be Shohei Ohtani’s best-ever MLB season. The two-way star has already had more impact than almost every other baseball player who has ever moved to the USA from Japan; however, he has never simultaneously been at his best as both a hitter and a pitcher. Now 31, he is clearly pacing himself when he can: as Petriello notes, Ohtani’s “once-elite Sprint Speed…is down to just the 32nd percentile”.

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This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇴 Norway leading the way in women’s handball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing England’s level in age-grade rugby union

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Vivien Endemann’s unusual skill

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇳🇴 Norway lead the first edition of the women’s handball ratings

When I introduced my first set of rankings for men’s international handball teams a couple of months ago, I wondered how fairly my system rated nations from Europe — the continent that dominates the sport — relative to those from elsewhere.

Are European teams punished by the high level of competition they face in regional tournaments? In the women’s game, the question is immaterial: nations from Europe make up the entire top six of the first set of rankings below. (Brazil (5.5) are the top-ranked team from another continent, sitting seventh; Egypt are in second place in the men’s game.) Two countries from the men’s top three — France (7.0) and Denmark (6.6) — are also present in the women’s, but both trail Norway (7.5) by a distance.

EHF Euro 2026 will be played in December, and the draw has just taken place after the conclusion of the second qualifying phase. Neither Norway nor Denmark featured, having finished in the top three of the 2024 edition; Hungary (5.4) were the other nation to get an automatic berth. Each of the top-six teams above who were required to take part went unbeaten in their qualifiers — but so too did Spain (4.2), whose best finish at a European Championship over the last decade is ninth.

📊 Chart of the week: Why don’t England dominate age-grade rugby?

England took care of Scotland in women’s rugby union on Saturday: they won their Six Nations match 84-7, and an earlier contest at the U21 age-grade by 51 points to 12. Would you expect anything else from the sport’s dominant force?

Actually, the picture is a bit more complicated than that. Since 2024, there’s been a formal structure in place for matches at various age-grades between the traditional ‘Six Nations’. Over that period, England have been miles ahead of every other country at senior level: they’ve scored 83% of the points in their matches in the elite competition. Their performances at U18, U20 and U21 level have lagged far behind, though: in roughly 14 games’ worth of action, they’ve scored just 45% of the points.

It’s France — the second-best team at senior level over this stretch — who dominate underage women’s rugby union in Europe. (Their aggregate point share at U18, U20 and U21 level is 84%.) What can we take away from this? My read is that England’s dominance of the sport at senior level is not because of a pipeline from the grassroots game bursting with talent; rather, this analysis suggests that their professional system adds a lot of value as players progress up to and through the senior ranks.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Vivien Endemann’s unusual skill

Opta’s soccer data uses the great descriptor ‘other body parts’ for shots at goal which do not directly come off either foot or a player’s head. To me, it conjures a mental image of a ball bundled messily across the line — not put away with control.

At first glance, you wouldn’t think that Vivien Endemann’s goal for Germany in their recent World Cup qualifier against Austria should fall into this category, such was the poise with which the 24-year-old redirected a cross from the right into the back of the net. On closer inspection, though, it was one of the most skilful finishes off the shin I can remember seeing: meeting the ball on the full, Endemann sent it towards the bottom corner as smoothly as if she was completing a pass with the side of her foot.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For the Financial Times, Chris Kay spoke to the chair of the Indian Premier League about its relationship to men’s test, ODI and T20I cricket. The most financially lucrative of the sport’s franchise tournaments is angling to be given more room in its calendar to expand — at the expense of traditional international fixtures. In their vision of the future, there are “fewer bilaterals, more league cricket, and in between you have [International Cricket Council] events, a bit like [soccer]”.

• For The Athletic, Tim Graham continued to cover the professional American football players who hope to play flag football for the USA at the Olympics next year by examining the injury risk associated with changing formats. A former NFL strength and conditioning coach explained: “These are unorthodox movements that aren’t being trained…When you’re not training on a day-in-day-out basis on certain, specific types of movements, you’re always going to be at a higher risk”.

• For Stuff, Merryn Anderson interviewed Grace Kukutai, a rugby league player from New Zealand, after she briefly returned to top-level netball. Kukutai — who has also played elite rugby union and rugby sevens — was granted permission by her NRLW coach to play one ANZ Premiership match for her old team as injury cover. She came through unscathed: “I don’t want to let fear hold me back from doing cool stuff…I’m glad my body was prepared enough that I handled it well.”

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇹🇼 Taiwan winning an Asian title in baseball5

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning an Asian title in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the top sources of women’s rugby union talent

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Max Dowman’s magic trick

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇹🇼 Taiwan win the 2026 Baseball5 Asia Cup

Baseball5? It’s not a typo. Back in 2017, the WBSC introduced a quickfire, mixed-gender version of baseball to ‘grow the game’. However, its resemblance to either baseball or softball — the other sport overseen by the WBSC — is questionable.

Each sport’s fundamental component — the contest between pitcher and batter — is eliminated, with baseball5 hitters initiating play by whacking a small rubber ball into the field of play with one hand. Leaving that aside: how successful has it actually been at growing the game? Each of the nations in the top five of the team ratings below has at least some pedigree in men’s baseball: Cuba, Taiwan, Japan and Venezuela also appeared in this year’s WBC, while China had qualified for every previous edition.

The success story of the sport’s first decade might be Thailand (5.6). Their men’s baseball team hasn’t played enough elite matches since 2022 to receive a rating, and their women’s softball team is currently ranked 14th out of 15 qualifying nations; in baseball5, however, they rank sixth overall. In their latest Asia Cup appearance last week, they reached the semi-finals for the first time and finished third overall. Taiwan (7.7) took out the title, but remain far behind global standard-setters Cuba (9.3).

🇦🇺 Australia win the 2026 FIBA Women’s 3x3 Asia Cup

Australia (6.7) continue to dominate women’s 3x3 basketball in Asia: after winning the 2026 edition of the Asia Cup, they have now claimed four consecutive continental titles. They were unbeaten in their five matches, scoring 65% of the total points.

They are yet to excel on the global stage, though; their best-ever World Cup finish is third, and they placed fifth in their only Olympics. China (5.8) — who lost to Australia in these Asia Cup semis — have actually recorded better finishes in both tournaments.

📊 Chart of the week: Where does top women’s rugby talent come from?

Two major international women’s rugby union tournaments will kick off this weekend: the Six Nations — contested by Europe’s top teams — and the Pacific Four Series. To casual followers of the sport, one country will be conspicuously absent: South Africa.

Along with New Zealand and England, they are one of just three nations to have won a World Cup in either men’s or women’s rugby union this century. Both of the others have some pedigree in each version; in South Africa, however, the men’s game is much, much stronger. Consider the ‘Dream Team’ selected annually by the sport’s global governing body since 2021: South Africa account for 29% of all selections in the men’s game — but they’re still waiting to record their first women’s selection.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Max Dowman’s magic trick

I’ve lived in England almost all of my adult life, but over that time I’ve struggled to warm to its sports teams and athletes as much as I do to those from other nations. A number of young prodigies might finally be starting to change that.

One is Henry Pollock, the 21-year-old rugby union player I wrote about last year. Another is 16-year-old Max Dowman. The England under-19 soccer international scored an astounding goal against Portugal during the recent international break: after feinting to let the ball roll past both him and his marker, he dribbled from the halfway line to the edge of the box before shooting low into the corner of the net. Some players are so talented you have no choice but to marvel at them.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPN, Ryan O’Hanlon ranked the 48 international men’s soccer teams set to compete in this year’s FIFA World Cup. By a combination of estimated squad value and Elo rating, current holders Argentina sit in seventh position. How reliant do they remain on Lionel Messi? “In World Cup qualifying, he played only 581 minutes, the 10th most of any Argentine player. Despite that, he led the team in expected possession value added…, expected assists and non-penalty goals.”

• For The Athletic, Tim Graham covered the fallout from the recent Fanatics Flag Football Classic. The USA men’s national team dominated squads containing several NFL stars in an invitational tournament last month. Quarterback Darrell Doucette said: “They were taking it for granted at first until they stepped on the field and saw how different it was. Some [NFL] guys came up to us afterward and said, ‘Man, y’all were right. This isn’t what we thought it was going to be.’”

• For ABC, Simon Smale reported on the surprise defection of one of the top men’s water polo players in Australia to Croatia — one of the strongest teams in the sport. World Aquatics recently reversed changes to its eligibility rules; after increasing its required waiting period to three years in 2023, since March 2025 athletes changing nations have only been required to spend “12 months of uninterrupted residency in [their] new nation”.

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published in two weeks’ time, on Monday April 20th.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇻🇪 Venezuela winning a world title in men’s baseball

• 🇯🇵 Japan winning an Asian title in women’s soccer

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing France’s level after the FIBA World Cup qualifiers

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kayla Reyneke’s sweet striking for South Africa

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇻🇪 Venezuela win the 2026 World Baseball Classic

One thing I’m eventually planning on analysing as part of this ‘Rank the Nations’ project is the effect of home advantage on match results. Events like the World Baseball Classic are likely to be a bit confounding, though.

Even though the final was played on American soil, it didn’t feel like the USA were at home. Support for South American and Caribbean teams in Miami was overwhelming throughout the tournament, and this continued on Tuesday; Venezuela’s win was greeted with a huge outpouring of joy. Across the two editions of the WBC that have taken place since 2022, the two finalists have performed at a similar underlying level: both teams have scored 65% of the total runs in their matches.

Venezuela (7.4) have the higher team rating, however, having won eight of their 10 matches. (The USA (6.8) have only won 10 of their 14 in aggregate.) The Dominican Republic (7.3) are in roughly the same tier as the current champions, but both teams are a step behind 2023 WBC winners Japan (8.2). If the sport’s top players are available, the 2028 Olympic tournament should be hotly contested; at this point, I’m definitely taking the field over the USA — even with home advantage in Los Angeles.

🇯🇵 Japan win the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup

Japan’s journey to their third Asian Cup title in four tournaments was a remarkably impressive one. In this year’s edition, they won all six of their games — by an aggregate scoreline of 29 goals to one.

Their excellent form over the last few weeks has vaulted them into the top three of my international women’s soccer rankings; their team rating had improved from 7.0 at the start of this tournament to 7.9 by the end.

📊 Chart of the week: Are France a true FIBA World Cup contender?

The qualifiers for the women’s basketball World Cup are unusual: all of the sport’s strongest nations compete, regardless of whether or not they’ve already qualified. My takeaway from the latest edition? Look out for France at the main event in September.

The expansion of the Qualifying Tournament from 16 teams in 2022 to 24 in 2026 meant that most major nations improved their performance level this time around; no one took a bigger leap forward than the silver medallists from the last Olympics, though. France won all five of their games on home soil, after recording a 1-2 win-loss record back in 2022. Their ‘point share’ improved out of sight, too: they scored only 47% of the points in their matches four years ago, but 59% of them this year.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kayla Reyneke’s sweet striking for South Africa

For a second consecutive week, my featured highlight is as much about what you can hear as what you can see. In this case, though, it wasn’t crowd noise that drew me in: it was the sound the ball makes when it comes off the middle of Kayla Reyneke’s bat.

The 20-year-old has now faced 71 balls in T20I cricket since making her debut for South Africa — and she’s hit 10 of them beyond the boundary for six. Only nine South Africans have hit more in the history of the format, and she’s only been playing international cricket for a couple of months. Facing the second delivery of the final over of the team’s innings against New Zealand last Tuesday, Reyneke got a ball in the slot and sent it high over the rope at cow corner with a bang.

You can watch a replay of this shot on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For the Boston Globe, Alex Speier laid out some of the challenges faced by Major League Baseball players from WBC champions Venezuela as a result of the US government’s immigration policy. Since December 2025, their visas have only covered a single entry to their country of employment; “if a Venezuelan player with a newly issued visa were to go home mid-season for a family emergency, he might need weeks to meet the requirements of returning to the United States”.

• For the Sydney Morning Herald, Chris Barrett and Iain Payten explained the Australian government’s proposed ‘sports diplomacy’ deal with Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. The nations would receive A$150mn for the development of rugby union — mirroring a similar deal for rugby league struck last year. Other context: the Chinese government has already begun funding sports infrastructure projects in the region, including a “[A]$40 million national sports complex” in Tonga.

• For The Athletic, Dermot Corrigan, Felipe Cárdenas and Guillermo Rai reported on the cancellation of men’s soccer’s Finalissima — the quadrennial fixture between the winner of the Copa América and the Euros. Spain were set to play Argentina in Qatar on Friday, but after the Iran war began an agreement on alternative arrangements couldn’t be reached: “[t]wo weeks of negotiations between the stakeholders involved…ended in an exchange of acrimonious statements”.

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published in two weeks’ time, on Monday April 6th.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands winning an international trophy in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning an international trophy in men’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇫🇷 France winning a European title in men’s rugby union

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing Italy’s trajectory in men’s rugby union

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Fernando Tatís Jr.’s WBC grand slam

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇳🇱 The Netherlands win the 2026 FIBA Women’s 3x3 Champions Cup

3x3 basketball has been an Olympic sport since Tokyo in 2021. Over its first two Games, seven different nations have filled the eight slots in the ‘final four’ of the women’s tournament — with five different nations winning medals.

Having won gold in Tokyo and bronze in Paris, the USA (7.1) are the only country to have won multiple Olympic medals. Despite being the top-ranked nation in the sport, however, they were knocked out of this year’s Champions Cup — an annual contest of top international teams — by Azerbaijan, who haven’t yet played enough matches to qualify for a rating in this system. That should change soon: they have already qualified for the 2026 FIBA 3x3 World Cup, which is taking place in Poland in June.

The USA’s roster was made up of four current WNBA players, but they had to settle for a third-place finish over the weekend. They did manage to beat eventual Cup winners the Netherlands (6.2) in the group stages, by 21 points to 18; the Dutch team went on to comfortably beat Azerbaijan 21-12 in yesterday’s final. They will head to Poland later this year having won three straight major tournaments: last year, they won both the 3x3 Europe Cup and the previous edition of the 3x3 World Cup.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 FIBA Men’s 3x3 Champions Cup

Serbia (6.5) and the Netherlands (6.0) were the two nations to go undefeated in the group stages of the men’s edition of this year’s Champions Cup, but both ended up being knocked out in the semi-finals.

The USA (6.6) are yet to medal in men’s 3x3 basketball at the Olympics, but beat Spain in the Champions Cup final yesterday to claim the sport’s top overall rating. The next men’s 3x3 World Cup will take place alongside the women’s later this year.

🇫🇷 France win the 2026 Men’s Six Nations Championship

Victory wasn’t secured until the final seconds of Saturday’s final round, but France (7.3) have won another European title in men’s rugby union. The French are the sport’s top-rated nation since 2022, and started this Six Nations with a trio of big wins.

However, their final two games raised question marks over their play without the ball. After conceding a total of 34 points through three rounds, they shipped 50 in a Round 4 loss — and won their final game this weekend despite giving up 46 points at home.

📊 Chart of the week: Are Italy finally on the up in men’s rugby union?

Italy lost their last Six Nations game this year, but I don’t think their overall performance — two wins out of five — should be considered as another false dawn. In the history of the tournament, they’ve never had this good a five-year spell.

Since 2022, they’ve scored 36% of the total points in their Six Nations games. This stretch, remarkably, has immediately followed their poorest period since they joined the tournament: over the five years to 2021, that figure had fallen as low as 25%. Wales beat them in Cardiff on Saturday, but by the end of this year’s tournament had slipped to a five-year point share of 35% themselves. For the first time in history, Italy aren’t the weakest team in the men’s Six Nations by this measure.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Fernando Tatís Jr.’s WBC grand slam

It’s the sounds of the World Baseball Classic that stay with me as much as the sights. Even before the knockout stages got underway on Friday, the competition had been pure joy and drama. The emotions have been addictive to consume vicariously.

At its best, international sport doesn’t just replicate what competitors and fans know and love about their game; it introduces them to a completely new dynamic. As Shawn Spradling — who’s covering the WBC on X — put it: it’s not been a ‘World Series atmosphere’, but a ‘World Cup atmosphere’. This is more true at the Dominican Republic’s games in Miami than anywhere else. Just watch a clip of Fernando Tatís Jr. hitting a grand slam against the Netherlands — and listen to the crowd go wild.

You can watch a replay of this home run on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• On Substack, Jeremias Engelmann broke down the impressive rookie season that Spain international Hugo González is having in the NBA. When the 20-year-old got off to a fast start, it was unclear if his statistical performance was sustainable. However, he’s continued to play winning basketball off the bench for the Boston Celtics: “[e]ven the metrics that tame the noise by pushing the ratings towards zero…have been overwhelmed by the strength of González’s on-off numbers”.

• For The Guardian, Jeff Rueter summarised how the USA’s women’s soccer team are looking after winning the annual invitational SheBelieves Cup. Without the ball, the USWNT have been formidable: they have now gone 804 minutes without conceding. They have largely kept the action far away from their own goal, too; as Rueter notes, goalies Claudia Dickey and Phallon Tullis-Joyce “weren’t tested often this window”, facing only three shots on target in total over three games.

• For ESPNCricinfo, Osman Samiuddin focused on one of the subplots of India’s recent win over New Zealand in the final of the T20I cricket World Cup: their effective use of slower balls. As with so many stories about recent Indian cricketing successes, this is really a story about their star fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah. Samiuddin has the numbers: “New Zealand collectively conceded 90 off their 31 pace-off deliveries. Bumrah conceded 12 off his 21.”

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday March 23rd.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇮🇳 India winning a world title in men’s T20I cricket

• 🇲🇽 Mexico winning a Pan American title in men’s softball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the sources of women’s soccer’s top players

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Lucy Hamilton’s first wicket for Australia

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇮🇳 India win the 2026 Men’s T20 World Cup

One of my strongest sporting opinions is that many other codes would benefit from adopting the North American tradition of deciding the winners of major competitions by contesting multi-game playoff series.

If I was in charge of T20I cricket, such a format change might be the first thing I would implement. Twenty20 can be a volatile game, and a single-elimination final therefore isn’t a great way to pick the winner of an important tournament like the recently concluded Men’s T20 World Cup. This year, that didn’t matter all that much: India (7.1) have outplayed every other team in the sport over the last five years, and thoroughly outplayed New Zealand (5.6) in yesterday’s final.

For consistency with other sports, bilateral series — which India have dominated — are excluded from this ranking system. Their excellence still shines through, though: in retaining the trophy this year, they became the first team to win two consecutive World Cup titles. (They were knocked out in the semi-finals in 2022.) What sets them apart from the rest is their aggressive approach to batting: over the last few weeks, they have scored three of the five highest team run totals in T20 World Cup history.

🇲🇽 Mexico win the 2026 Men’s Softball Pan American Championship

A slightly late update on some men’s softball from last month: the Pan American Championship concluded at the end of February. Argentina (7.8) are comfortably the highest-rated team in the sport — but they didn’t manage to win the competition.

The South American nation were hoping for a third consecutive title, but they were upset 0-1 by Mexico (5.2) in the final. Canada (6.7) and the USA (6.7) were the two strongest other nations competing, but respectively finished fourth and fifth overall.

📊 Chart of the week: Where are women’s soccer’s top players from?

For ‘Rank the Nations’, I’ll also be tracking the ‘player of the year’ and ‘team of the year’ awards handed out by global governing bodies. As the Asian Cup kicked off, this week I was interested in looking at where top players in women’s soccer come from.

At first glance, there is more diversity in the women’s game: since 2020, players from nations outside Europe make up 26% of FIFA World 11 selections. (In men’s soccer, it’s 20%.) The real story, though, is within Europe. In the men’s game, many countries outside the ‘big five’ — England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — churn out lots of top talent. In the women’s game, though, their pipelines are not currently producing at the same rate: those smaller nations account for just 8% of World 11 selections.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Lucy Hamilton’s first wicket for Australia

Unless and until some sort of structure of regular competition is set up by the ICC for women’s test cricket, I won’t be able to put together any team ratings for this format. Currently, fixtures are just too infrequent — even over a five-year time period.

The rare tests which do take place still make for great viewing, though. During last week’s match between India and Australia, I enjoyed watching young left-arm fast bowler Lucy Hamilton excel in only her second international appearance. Her first wicket for Australia was quite the scalp: in the sixth over of the first innings, she pitched the ball up to Smriti Mandhana and nipped it between the opener’s bat and her front pad. Middle stump was pegged back, and the 19-year-old let out a roar.

You can watch a replay of this dismissal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Guardian, Tanya Aldred reported on T20I cricket in China, where more resources are allocated to the women’s game than to the men’s. The women are still far from good enough to qualify for the Olympic Games, but — according to a Chinese academic who spoke at a conference in England last month — this atypical disparity reflects the nation’s view of “the promotion of women’s sport as an efficient pathway to maximise China’s performance in the global medal race”.

• For the Irish Times, Nathan Johns investigated how Ireland were able to recruit one of the top rugby union prospects in South Africa away from their rivals. The Irish governing body is always alert for opportunities to widen its player pool, but the family circumstances of back-row forward Josh Neill are unique: his “older brother, Jordan, made a similar decision a few years earlier…for cricket, rather than rugby, representing Ireland at an Under-19 World Cup”.

• On Substack, Neil Paine showed just how dominant Japan have been over the 20-year history of the World Baseball Classic. Coming into this year’s tournament, the defending champions had won 79% of their WBC matches and had “roughly double the cumulative run differential of the next-highest nation”. (At 71%, the Dominican Republic have the next-best win rate.) So far in 2026, they have won all three of their pool-stage games and outscored their opponents 25-9.

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday March 16th.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands leading the way in women’s field hockey

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands leading the way in men’s field hockey

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing New Zealand’s form in women’s rugby sevens

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Sam Kerr’s return for the Matildas

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇳🇱 The Netherlands lead the first edition of the women’s field hockey ratings

Some of the team ratings that emerge from this project inspire more confidence than others do. Performing this type of analysis has given me an appreciation for just how much more robust the international calendar is in certain team ball sports.

Of any code I’ve featured to date, field hockey might have the best-established calendar. As well as a World Cup, the Olympics and other regional tournaments, top nations play in a round-robin competition called the Pro League every year. I’m more confident that the women’s ratings below, then, give an accurate picture of relative strength than those in men’s ice hockey that I deconstructed last week. As a result, I’m also as impressed by the Netherlands (8.7) as I have been by any team so far.

The latest round of 2025-26 Pro League fixtures concluded this week, and the Netherlands are still unbeaten — with a goal difference far beyond their closest challenger. Their competitive record is truly remarkable: they’ve won five out of six possible Pro League titles, the last five EuroHockey Championships, the last three World Cups and the last two Olympic gold medals. They host the 2026 World Cup on home soil in August; anything but another Dutch win would leave me hugely surprised.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands lead the first edition of the men’s field hockey ratings

The Netherlands (7.0) are also the top-rated team in men’s field hockey. While their overall level is well short of their female compatriots, there is still a considerable gap between them and Belgium (6.4) — the next-best team right now.

Overall, ratings in the men’s game are much more compressed. In the women’s, only the six teams in the table above have a rating above 5.0; there are eight such nations on the men’s side, with six of them currently sitting between 5.1 and 6.0.

📊 Chart of the week: Are New Zealand improving in women’s sevens?

Conversely, women’s rugby sevens seems to be moving further away from parity. In recent years, Australia (7.9) have been close behind New Zealand (8.5) at the top; in 2026, the Kiwis have played at a level their nearest challenger can’t match.

In their games at the two HSBC SVNS Series tournaments held this calendar year, New Zealand have scored 84% of the total points. After a drop-off between 2023 and 2024, they have improved their ‘point share’ by significant increments in both 2025 and 2026. Meanwhile, Australia — who were effectively going point for point with their biggest rivals as recently as 2023 — have dropped well off the pace by this metric: their point share of 65% so far in 2026 would be their lowest mark of this era.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Sam Kerr’s return for the Matildas

In happier news for Australian sports fans, Matildas superstar Sam Kerr is back in action at the Asian Cup. The continent’s major women’s soccer tournament kicked off yesterday in Perth, and only Japan (7.0) are rated more highly than the hosts (6.2).

Kerr spent well over a year on the sidelines for her club Chelsea after rupturing a knee ligament in January 2024, and her goal in the Asian Cup opener this weekend against the Philippines was her first for Australia in 851 days. It was a very pleasing striker’s goal: as a cross sailed over her head in the six-yard box, Kerr stayed put and let the two defenders around her swarm towards the ball. A headed pass from a teammate sent it back in her direction, and she nodded the ball home from a few yards out.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Guardian, Samantha Lewis reported on North Korea’s return to a major international soccer competition — for the first time since 2012 — at the Asian Cup. Despite this long absence at senior level, they have a lot of talent to build a team around: “[t]hanks to their decades-long investment in women’s football, particularly the opening of the Pyongyang International Football School in 2013, the nation’s youth teams are experiencing a second wave of success”.

• For MLB.com, Mike Petriello compared the last of the World Baseball Classic in 2023 to the baseball most fans are used to watching in the major leagues. One statistic in particular foreshadowed a change at MLB level: the frequency and effectiveness with which pitchers from Japan threw split-finger fastballs. Per Petriello, their pitchers “threw approximately 62% of all splitters in the tournament themselves; more than half the teams didn’t throw a single one”.

• For Good Areas, Jarrod Kimber quantified what makes India’s T20I cricket opener Abhishek Sharma different from other aggressive batters in the format. He scores more quickly in the first 10 balls of his innings than anyone else, and does so by hitting the ball in the air much more frequently than anyone else — while maintaining elite levels of control. As Kimber puts it: “[h]e’s taking more risk than anyone ever has, and being rewarded more than any ever has”.

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday March 9th.

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In today’s special edition of The Week in International Sport, focused on the ice hockey tournaments at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games:

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning gold in the women’s tournament

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning gold in the men’s tournament

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the competitiveness of the women’s ‘final four’

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mitch Marner’s overtime game-winner

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇺🇸 The USA win Olympic gold in the women’s ice hockey tournament

Coming into the women’s tournament at this Olympics, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The USA were neck-and-neck with Canada in my ratings; however, I exclude bilateral fixtures from this system to avoid skewing teams’ relative schedule strength too much.

Why is that relevant? Late last year, the Americans comfortably won all four matches in the two teams’ annual ‘Rivalry Series’. In retrospect, this was a strong indicator of their quality: after going undefeated on their way to gold, there’s now no doubt that the USA (8.5) are the world’s strongest women’s ice hockey team. While there was jeopardy in their gold-medal game against Canada (8.0) — it was decided in sudden-death overtime — a win by their neighbours would have been a definite upset.

Below the two standout teams at the top, Switzerland (3.2) won bronze after beating Sweden (5.0) in overtime. Currently rated as the sport’s sixth-best team by this system, the Swiss snuck through three low-scoring games in the knockouts by an aggregate of four goals to three. (Two one-goal victories offset a 2-1 loss to Canada in their semi-final.) This marked a real turnaround from their preliminary-stage performance: they lost their first four matches at the Games 5-15 in aggregate.

🇺🇸 The USA win Olympic gold in the men’s ice hockey tournament

Unlike in the women’s game, the gold-medal-winning team from the USA (7.1) hasn’t been the top-rated team in men’s ice hockey over the last five years. The rankings below have Canada (7.2) as slightly better in competitive fixtures since 2022.

Each North American team is comfortably clear of Sweden (6.6) in third place. However, these ratings include a number of annual tournaments which top NHL players are either unavailable for or opt not to participate in: the IIHF World Championship, and — for European nations only — the Euro Hockey Tour. As well as Canada, both Sweden and Switzerland (5.4) have won a higher percentage of their World Championship games over this period than the USA have.

If we consider only the two ‘best-on-best’ tournaments that have taken place in the last year or so, though, the Americans come out on top. Across this month’s Olympic tournament and last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off, Canada and the USA have each won eight of their 10 games. However, yesterday’s gold medallists have scored 70% of the goals in these games; despite their strength with the puck — scoring 4.1 goals per game to the USA’s 3.8 — silver medallists Canada sit at a ‘goal share’ of just 66%.

📊 Chart of the week: How tight were games in the women’s ‘final four’?

It’s too early to assess the impact of the PWHL on international ice hockey; this was the first Games since it was set up in North America in 2023. For now, all we can say is that the ‘final four’ of the 2026 edition was the closest the Olympics has ever seen.

Across the two semi-finals and the two medal matches this year, the average winning margin was just two goals per game — despite the dominant USA team winning their semi-final against Sweden 5-0. This is lower than the average margin at this stage of each of the six previous editions that were decided in this format. (There were no semi-finals in the first edition in 1998.) The drop from four years ago was notable: in 2022, ‘final four’ games were decided by a margin of almost four goals on average.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mitch Marner’s overtime game-winner

It’s no secret to long-time readers that I have a lot of contempt for ‘psychobabble’. With that in mind, I enjoyed seeing several players who often cop flak at NHL level putting in performances during the men’s tournament that challenged such narratives.

Goalie Connor Hellebuyck — who apparently can’t handle the pressure of the NHL playoffs — pulled off some incredible saves to keep the USA in the gold-medal game. On Canada’s side, Mitch Marner has faced similar criticisms in the postseason. His team didn’t end the Games how they wanted, but Marner came good in a high-stakes moment: during overtime in their quarter-final, the forward scythed through the defence and flipped a backhand into the net to win the game almost single-handedly.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Bluesky here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPN, Ryan S. Clark profiled 22-year-old Laila Edwards — one of a number of college athletes on the USA’s women’s team at this Olympics, and the first Black woman ever to represent her country in ice hockey.

• For theScore, Kyle Cushman laid out where Canada could go from here to try and put their women’s program back on top of the world. A first step: giving more chances to their own young talent, like 19-year-old Chloe Primerano.

• For the Boston Globe, Katie McInerney looked ahead to the resumption of the third season of the PWHL this week. USA forward Kendall Coyne Schofield told McInerney: “women’s hockey isn’t going to go silent, it’s not going to go dark”.

• For The Athletic, James Mirtle examined how few NHL games goalies from Canada are playing. Their share of the league-wide total “has dipped from 65% at the turn of the millennium down to an all-time low of 24.9% this season.”

• For the Hockey PDOcast, Dimitri Filipovic tracked some key statistics during the men’s tournament. One finding: Canada’s reliance on their ‘big three’ — Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon and Macklin Celebrini — to create chances.

• For The Athletic, Pierre LeBrun and Dom Luszczyszyn tried to work out how strong Russia’s men’s squad would have been, had they been free to compete. Their best guess: “[a] team that would’ve likely been the bronze medal favorite”.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands winning a European title in women’s water polo

• 🇪🇸 Spain winning a European title in men’s futsal

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing India’s success in youth ODI cricket

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kristýna Kaltounková’s first Olympic point

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

🇳🇱 The Netherlands win the 2026 Women’s European Water Polo Championship

Already, this project has been useful for highlighting sports where playing talent in the men’s game appears to be differently distributed to the women’s version. (Why these differences arise is another question, which I’ll try and answer as the year goes on.)

Water polo is one sport that it’s helpful to look at through this lens. Like in the men’s game, Spain (7.3) have been the top-rated women’s side since 2022; however, only two other nations from the men’s top six are also present at the top of the women’s rankings. There is much more geographical diversity on the other side of the sport: whereas the men’s top six featured only European nations, two countries from other continents — the USA (7.2) and Australia (6.0) — feature in the table below.

They’re not shown here, but Canada (5.5), Brazil (4.3) and New Zealand (3.8) also round out the women’s game’s top 10. (Only two non-European nations makes it into the men’s top 10.) I’m keen to learn more about water polo in the Netherlands, too. They have one of the highest-rated women’s teams in the world (6.9), and won a second consecutive European title last Thursday. Their men’s team, in contrast, hasn’t even played enough top-level games over the last five years to qualify for a rating.

🇪🇸 Spain win the 2026 men’s European Futsal Championship

For the second weekend in a row, two of the top nations in men’s futsal went head to head in a continental final. While the favourite won last week’s Copa América decider, the last game at UEFA Futsal Euro 2026 was won by the lower-rated team.

On Saturday, Spain (7.5) beat Portugal (7.9) 5-3 to win their first European title in a decade. Both teams were unbeaten heading into the final; in fact, Portugal hadn’t lost at the Euros since 2016 — when Spain knocked them out on the way to their last title.

📊 Chart of the week: Are India unstoppable in youth ODI cricket?

As well as cross-gender comparisons, I’m also interested in using this database to compare nations’ performances across age-grades. With the conclusion of the men’s under-19 World Cup last week, I thought ODI cricket was a good place to start.

Here, I’ve compared each nation’s win rate in U19 World Cup matches to their win rate in senior men’s World Cups since 1998. India and Australia are the top two at each level, but the much larger country does much better at U19 level. This lines up with my expectation: bigger populations should churn out more talent on a year-to-year basis, but a bottleneck effect exists at the top of international sport. It doesn’t matter if you have 50 cricketers of international quality; only 11 can play at any one time.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kristýna Kaltounková’s first Olympic point

Europeans aren’t just moving to North America to play professional women’s ice hockey, as we saw last week; many emigrate to play at collegiate level, too. One such player is Kristýna Kaltounková, a 23-year-old forward from the Czech Republic.

Kaltounková was the first selection in last year’s PWHL Draft out of Colgate University, and has already established herself at senior level: she was an All-Star at last year’s World Championship, and — per The Athletic’s player-value model, at least — is the best player at this year’s Olympics not on the roster of the USA or Canada. She got her first point at the Games on Friday by putting her body on the line, throwing herself towards a rebound and spearing the puck between the Swiss goalie’s legs into the net.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Athletic, Dom Luszczyszyn analysed the strength of every elite nation’s men’s ice hockey team at past major tournaments. One interesting takeaway from this work is that — despite their squad’s enviable depth this year — Sweden’s best players at this Olympics don’t match up to their stars of the past. Per Luszczyszyn: “Sweden’s top four forwards and top defenseman usually combine for 70 goals of value. The 2026 roster sits at 55.”

• For The Ringer, Ben Lindbergh looked back over the history of the rosters picked by the USA for the World Baseball Classic. This year, things look particularly good for the country that will host the WBC’s knockout rounds — especially on the pitching mound, where the Americans have generally failed to persuade top eligible players to join their team. Lindbergh concludes that this is “the first time that an American club in the WBC can truly aspire to a “Dream Team” label”.

• For The Athletic, Colin Millar and Felipe Cárdenas reported on measures brought in by Argentina’s national governing body to prevent soccer players who sign their first professional contracts overseas from being called up for international squads. This initiative is designed to keep their best youth players on home soil; “[s]even players who have been called up to the [men’s] senior squad since the September international window would not qualify for selection under this rule”.

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published in two weeks’ time, on Monday February 23rd.

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