Script
Chapter 1.1 - Scemametrics
So you’re me and you’re making a YouTube series about the World Cup. What do you do? What do you write episodes about?
One of the more obvious ideas would be to make an episode addressing the question of which team is the best in the multiverse. The answer to that is both simple and boring.
The teams at the top of the SRS standings are there because they got to play in the eras where there were lots of World Cups per year, and much fewer active teams to compete with. All but four of these teams made their debuts before 2009. The years 2012 to 2019 are so under-represented due to how rarely tournaments are played in the modern era that any conversation about which team is the greatest is at best futile, and at worst boring.
I don’t care which team is the best. I want to know: which team is the most *ridiculous*.
[Intro]
I know what you’re thinking. “You can’t measure ridiculousness”. Well you can. There is a formula. I should know, because I invented it. With a little help from a friend.
September 2019, My colleague Defecating Daffodil and I are in the same city. We meet for food here, at the Luminosa, a restaurant that does traditional Audioslavian seafood. I’m eating an octopus and I’m telling DD of my idea to find a formula to properly measure how ridiculous every World Cup team is. I tell him I want to figure out how silly a team’s name is, and Daffodil, being a genius, suggests ‘scrabble score per letter’. It’s a wonderful idea. It becomes part of the Ridiculousness Formula. An exercise in Scemametrics.
First up, here’s how find out how ridiculous your team’s name is.
The Scrabble Metric
(((SS / LEN) * NSC) + LP) * SP
SS is the scrabble score of the nation’s name, and we divide that by the total amount of letters in the name. After doing this, we get the average scrabble score per letter.
Then we do the same again, but this time with French Scrabble. We’ve used a representative from the scrabble sets of a Germanic language and a Romance language so as not to appear too anglocentric. I considered using a slavic language too, but they’re all missing some letters and adding others and, in truth, if your nation has diacritics in its name, it’s pretty ridiculous. Seriously. Name a team with diacritics who have won a major European club competition in RL States. I’ll wait.
Unfortunately for Krytenia here, Ks and Ys are weird in French, so their score is bumped up to just over five points per letter. But we’re not finished yet.
This score is multiplied by however many ‘non-standard characters’ there are. Here, any punctuation, dashes or diacritics are viewed as non-standard characters, but so too are capital letters. Every team has at least one capital letter, so every score gets multiplied by at least one. Here, West-East Timor’s score is multiplied by four.
Penalising having more than one capital letter means the more words you have in your nation’s name, the more ridiculous you are. It makes sense. I mean which is more ridiculous, South Sudan or Germany? Papa New Guinea or Canada? The United States or St. Vincent and the Grenadines?
The average length of a nation name in this list is eleven characters. We’ve set the acceptable limit at 18 characters. If your nation name has more than eighteen characters, you get a penalty for every letter over the eighteenth. This is ‘LP’, or ‘Length Penalty’. It gets added to the previous score.
That’s that, for nations that aren’t playing Stupid Games.
Because if you play Stupid Games, you win Stupid Prizes. S.P.
We went through every nation name and checked it for the following conditions. If it met one or more of the following conditions, its total Scrabble Metric was *doubled*.
Nation’s name looks like a WiFi password
Nation’s name looks like a teenager's email address
Nation’s name contains a stupid pun
Nation’s name contains a verb
Nation’s name contains the name of an RL States Person
Nation’s name contains the name of an RL States Institution
Nation name is just a cardinal direction plus the name of an established NS nation.
Nation’s name contains arbitrary repetition
Nation’s name contains childish humour
Nation’s name is Krytenia
The first two - looking like a wifi password or a teenager’s email address - are self explanatory.
No reasonable country would have a verb in its title, so that’s ridiculous. I gave the benefit of the doubt to a few teams. ‘Partially Blind People’, for example. I assume the word ‘blind’ is an adjective. That this name describes the people in the nation. IE: ‘Partially Blind People’ isn’t an instruction.
Unnecessary repetition is stupid, and puts a strike against the names of Bearbears and Michael Stricklanttt.
Naming your nation after a rubbish central American football team is ridiculous. Calling your team ‘Alan Shearer’ is ridiculous. The fact that this happaned three times doesn’t make it any less stupid.
If your puppet is the name of your main plus a compass direction, that’s stupid. It’s like having two dogs and calling them ‘Rex’ and ‘Other Rex’. Plus, states with cardinal directions are inherently stupid on RL States in a stab-you-in-the-face-for-being-there kind of way. North Korea. Northern Ireland. Northern Cyprus. South Sudan. South Africa. Steer clear.
Unneccessary repetition also gets your name put on the list.
Any name with ‘fart’ in the title, or anything like that, gets you on the list, as does any Unneccessary repetition.
I could have put Krytenia in the list anyway for its name being a pun of a character from an RL States comedy show, but I thought it was important to state explicitly that, yes, this *is* a witch hunt against teams I don’t like.
I considered also instigating a rule that any team name that followed the adjective plus animal, vegetable or mineral pattern was silly, but I decided against it, as the names always give me a chuckle.
There are three other signs that your team may be ridiculous: First, the era they played in. If a team last ventured out on the field in the pre-Jolt era, their score gets multiplied by three. If they played with us in the Jolt era, it gets multiplied by two. There’s no penalty here for modern teams. That’s just life. Names that were popular eighty years ago sound ridiculous today. Go back through your family tree and look at your great grandparents’ names. Ethel. Doris. Velma. Cedric. Clarence. Kevin. Ridiculous.
Next up is the Redheaded Stepchild Factor. This is simple. It’s how many times a team is thrashed every cycle. How many times per cycle the team loses by three or more goals. If you typically lose by three twice per cycle, your score is mulitplied by two.
Finally we have the Fail Ratio. This is the ratio of non-qualification to qualification. If you never qualified for the World Cup, this figure is ‘1’ and your score gets multiplied by one. If you qualified four times in ten attempts, your fail ratio would be 4:6. You failed 60% of the time, so your score gets multiplied by 0.6
For these last two, the minimum score is 40%. Even if you’ve never lost by three or more or you made every World Cup you attempted, you still get your score multiplied by 0.4 and 0.4, rather than 0 and 0. It stops these metric being totally overpowered for nations from 2003 who qualified for the last 32 from a field of only 60.
These four scores are multiplied together to give a nation their Ridiculousness Score. There is one final piece to the puzzle, though. Scorigami. If your nation ever achieved Scorigami, your total score is… more than doubled. Scorigami may be beautiful, but it is ridiculous, and as such it’d be remiss not to include it here.
Finally, your score is divided by 109.3. Because. And there it is. This is how ridiculous you are.
Let’s plug a couple of teams into this formula and see what we get. I know just the candidates. In our last episode, we heard the voice of Aslotten Bederborg sa Cesky legend, William Čalrek, berate Super Llama-land for being ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Well let’s find out *who* is more ridiculous. The Scorigami legends or their greatest foes.
ABC
Era: 1 (Modern)
SS: 58
RSF: 3.33
Fail Ratio: 1 (F3:Q0)
Scorigami: Y (11-3 vs The United Squiggles)
Ridiculousness: 3.53
12th most ridiculous World Cup nation of all time.
Super-Llamaland
Era: 1 (Modern)
SS: 8.6
RSF: 0.85
Fail Ratio: (F13:Q7) 0.65
Scorigami: N
Ridiculousness: 0.04
2,616th most ridiculous nation of a list of 3,115
Unrecorded Content
Chapter 1.2 - All Aboard
<The original script for Episode 2, Chapter 1 had a section on 95X, which was scrapped due to 95X's permissions implying reproduction of its content on YT would be unwelcome[/url]. Here is what was written.
Ninety-Five X are 0.6 ridiculous. 60%. How did we arrive at that number? Well, 95X are peculiar in that two of their stats are quite good, and the other two, not so much.
First of all, the era. They’re with us right now. That’s good. No multipliers there. They tend to lose by three or more goals one and a half times per cycle. Also, not so bad, but not a reflection of their status in world football right now. This is a score that is skewed somewhat by their first cycle in World Cup football.
For years, 95X were famous for only playing in Atlantian Oceania’s regional tournament, the AOCAF, and eschewing the World Cup, a habit they only kicked in World Cup 76. They won two AOCAF Cups while having no official World Ranking.
Three cycles before AOCAF Cup 22 became their first silverware, 95X had taken part in World Cup 38’s qualifying tournament. We say ‘taken part’, in reality a young and inexperienced squad was thrown to the lions. Their group contained Ariddia, who had won World Cups 32, 34 and 36 and were looking to continue their even pace, an Ulzaxid team that would finish second in the group ahead of Jasiyun, whose domestic football competition is one of the strongest of all time. The other non-qualifiers from that group were Vilita, Starblaydia and Minilla Island, who have won ten World Cups between them. Even so, 95X only failed to finish in mid-table due to goal difference. A goal-difference very much affected by heavy defeats to the group’s front-runners.
Cycle 38
95X 2-0 Rangpur
Minilla Island 3-0 95X
95X 2-0 Starblaydia
Ulzaxid 1-1 95X
95X 1-3 Jasīyūn
Ariddia 7-0 95X
95X 1-4 Vilita
Rangpur 0-2 95X
95X 1-0 Minilla Island
Starblaydia 3-2 95X
95X 3-4 Ulzaxid
Jasīyūn 3-0 95X
95X 1-6 Ariddia
Vilita 5-1 95X
Complete Gubbings: 6
Cycles 76-83 in their Entirety:
Complete Gubbings: 6
The comparative success of their later years has gone some way to diminishing the effect of their World Cup 38 disaster, and since their return in World Cup 76, 95X have qualified for two World Cups. 25% of all they’ve entered. Their Fail Ratio is 2:6, so the score is multiplied by 0.75, and that is multiplied by 1.5. It’d be a respectable, average score if it weren’t for 95X’s scrabble metric.
How many points is ’95X’ in Scrabble? Well, there’s two possible answers. The real answer, which is ‘zero’, because 95X isn’t in the dictionary, and the Scrabble Metric answer, which is a whopping 58. ‘X’ is worth 8 points in English Scrabble and 10 in French Scrabble, so that’s 18. 9 and 5 don’t have points values in Scrabble, because they’re numbers, and there aren’t any words in the dictionary that have digits in them. We’ve given any digit a points value of 10 in English and 10 in French, making 20 each in total. It makes sense to penalise a country for having numbers in its name. I mean, what RL States country has numbers in its name? No, Kuwait doesn’t count. And neither does Tuvalu. Or Tenmark. A score of 19.3 points per character is second only to 46566’s perfect 20. The highest possible.
There are only three characters in 95X, so their score is divided by three. Unfortunately, there are three non-standard characters in 95X - yes, having an upper-case X as a third letter in a word is not normal - so their score is multiplied by three.
There’s no penalty for length, of course, though with only three characters there’s a case to be made for a brevity penalty, and they don’t fall foul of any Stupid Prizes multiplier, so their score stays at 58.
Multiply everything together and divide by 109.3 and you get a ridiculousness rating of 0.6. A little silly? Sure, but not completely. They are only 0.6 ridiculous. 60% of one full ridicule. I mean, it makes sense to me. However good 95X are at football, and they are very handy, it is, at its core, a nation named after a bus.
Previously on The Idiot Project
Episode One:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3 (A)
Chapter 3 (B)
Chapter 4
Chapter 4.5
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Each of Group F's representatives seemed quietly confident of progressing to the second round when interviewed at the draw on Sunday evening. Sargossa head coach Rodrigo Defederico pointed out his side's 3-2 win over Audioslavia in qualifying and the Corsairs' comeback to win the group from seemingly down-and-out in third. Audioslavia's Wilf Lidgley pointed to the fact that Audioslavia all but had beaten Sargossa in the first round of matches and had had the group wrapped up at the half way stage and had taken their foot firmly off the gas by the time Sargossa came calling. Fellow Apoxian Gavin Hughes told a similar story, with both Siovenija and Teusland opening comfortable leads at the top of qualifying group five before sauntering down the home stretch, while star midfielder Thorsten Kramer of 1830 Cathair made sure everybody knew that all of his S&T team could flourish in an Audioslavia team, and that the Goldhorns had a red rag in their pocket for the bulls.
Only Vilita played down their chances.
Ranked number one in the world, winners of two of the last three World Cups and favourites for a record sixth world championship, many Vilitans have been wary of over-confidence. Garbage personality Nikkii Kater twii.turred a lesson from history, noting that the first time a Vilitan overplayed their team's strength they were ragdolled around their group in unceremonious fashion. 'Vilkaus Warns of Vilita Thread' had been the headline. The words have been tossed back into many a Vilitan's face in various forms over the years.
I've been Jeremy Jaffacake, G'night B <message ends, interrupted by music>