🌍 The Week in International Sport

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:

• 🇿🇦 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

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.)

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 (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 (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 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.

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.

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.

• 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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The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday June 15th.