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:
🇺🇸 The USA winning a world title in women’s field lacrosse
🇵🇱 Poland winning a world title in men’s volleyball
📊 Chart of the week: assessing the overall popularity of team ball sports
⏪️ Highlight of the week: Vikki Wall’s strong shoulder
💭 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.)
Last week’s edition on the Commonwealth Games meant that a number of events slipped into today’s newsletter. It’s a shame, as I’ve been dying to write about the Haudenosaunee for quite a while.
The World Lacrosse Women’s Championship finished up last Sunday, and this union of Iroquois tribes indigenous to the east of North America — granted permission by the sport’s governing body to compete as a standalone nation — came fourth for the first time ever. With a rating of 4.5, they don’t crack the top six of my first set of field lacrosse rankings below; with an estimated population in the low six figures, however, they certainly stack up well against the nations above them on a per-capita basis.
Lacrosse will return to the Olympics in 2028 in the ‘sixes’ format — but it’s not clear the IOC will allow the Haudenosaunee to participate. This was already a difficult question for organisers. (The modern sport descends from games played hundreds of years ago by indigenous American peoples, but the nation doesn’t yet qualify to set up a National Olympic Committee.) Their women’s side finishing one win away from a medal at this year’s field lacrosse Worlds will make it an even more contentious one.
Poland (6.8) are currently the strongest team in men’s volleyball by a margin; they have just won their second straight VNL title, and a third in four years. The USA (6.0) finished second in this year’s edition, after losing the final in five sets.
While that result was in line with expectation, Slovenia (5.8) turning over higher-rated Japan (6.0) in the third-place game was more of a surprise. The European nation had lost at that stage — and ultimately finished fourth — in each of the last two editions.
I’m conscious that I’ve not written about tennis or golf at all this year. Thinking about them and other sports I’ve excluded by choosing to re-scope the newsletter to focus on team ball sports, I’ve wondered: how much of the sporting world am I neglecting?
Data published by sports consultancy firm Two Circles earlier this year sheds a bit of light. Assets in team ball sports accounted for more than two-thirds of all revenues generated by global sporting IP in 2025, per their latest report; individual ball sports like golf and tennis accounted for just a 4% share. Even more stark, though, is the split within this broad category: really, it’s soccer — which takes slightly more than a quarter of all revenue from sporting intellectual property by itself — and everything else.
I’m cheating again. This week’s highlight is actually from last weekend — and it’s from a sport I’m not formally tracking for ‘Rank the Nations’. Australian rules football’s inaugural ‘Australia v Ireland’ game was far too good to pass over, though.
46 Irish women are contracted to play in the AFLW this season; almost all of them grew up playing Gaelic football, which remains entirely amateur in their home country. One of the moments of the match in Sydney actually came from a player in their ranks who has professional experience in a third sport. A clean hit by former rugby sevens international Vikki Wall in the fourth quarter made it clear that Ireland — even if well behind on the scoreboard — weren’t going to let the locals push them around.
You can watch a replay of this hit on Instagram here.
For The Athletic, Sabreena Merchant reviewed the 12-player squad selected by the USA for September’s FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Where the 2024 Olympic team prioritised experience, this group has had an injection of youth; four women 24 or younger have been selected for a major tournament for the first time. Caitlin Clark is in after a controversial omission in Paris; as Merchant put it, “this is a USA Basketball roster that every casual fan will be able to recognize”.
For ESPNCricinfo, Firdose Moonda spoke to the chair of Namibia Cricket ahead of the country co-hosting the 2027 men’s ODI World Cup. Late format changes have upset players from smaller ‘Associate’ nations (including Namibia) who now face elimination before the official group stage even begins. He didn’t offer much sympathy, advising them to focus instead on the shorter T20I format: “if you look at popularity for ODI cricket, we don't really know where it is going”.
For the Los Angeles Times, Thuc Nhi Nguyen reported on how the city used this year’s men’s soccer World Cup to prepare for the 2028 Summer Olympics. Some parts of the city are hoping to maximise the benefits of LA28 by focusing on fans’ experience. Santa Monica — which “balked at the chance to host competitions” — aims to be a hub for extracurricular activity. “I think major global events have an extractive history,” its mayor said. “We are trying to change that.”
The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday August 17th.
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