🌍 The Week in International Sport
Monday May 11th: beach soccer, Pakistan in test cricket and Aoife Wafer
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.
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
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.)
🇧🇷 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”.
The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday May 18th.
