JonH wrote:

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For my own amusement, I thought I would try and keep track of the top tennis nations over the course of the year and see where GB stacked up. Being honest, my main interest is the mens game, so I planned to track the week by week average rankings of the top 10 players in each of the key countries and see if GB managed to raise itself off bottom. Countries I will track are: USA, France, Australia and GB (ie the grand slam countries) and Spain, Italy, Germany and Argentina (the other countries with real depth).

So, w.c. 9th January rankings (average for top 10 in each country)

1, Spain 32.9

2. France 34.5

3. Argentina 66.7

4. USA 69.5

5. Germany 90.1

6. Australia 130.9

7. Italy 134.8

8. GB 215.3

Not surprisngly GB are 8th on this list, but I felt it would interesting to see how they progress. A few things interested me more generally:

How close Spain and France are - be interesting to see how that develops

Argentina are 3rd which really surprised me, although on reflection, they do have a real cluster of top 100 players 

I expected Germany to be closer to the top 4 as my instinct was they had depth like Argentina, but clearly not as strong on this measure.

 

My numbers may be slightly off, but I think it is broadly correct and will try and update, perhaps monthly.

 

cheers

 

Jon 

 

 

 

 

 

  

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 Just to add, the GB guys would need to move a collective 800 places or more up the rankings to move up to 7th in this list...given Andy is top, then that is 90 or so places per person. And Kyle and Dan clearly can't do that! Be lovely if it happened though! 

Thanks for this, JonH - interesting. Might be worth adding in Russia? By my calculation they're at 117.2, between Germany and Australia.

It's an interesting table, Jon. Just to give some extra info, I've reproduced your list below with the approx. populations of each country too. I leave it to someone else to do the math (!), and there will be other countries that should be included if we were doing it on a per capita basis. But it's obviously relevant. And puts the achievement of Australia, and 'lack' of achievement by the USA, for instance, into perspective.


Country - tennis ranking - population


1, Spain 32.9 - 46m

2. France 34.5 - 64.5m

3. Argentina 66.7 - 44m

4. USA 69.5 - 324 m

5. Germany 90.1 - 80.6m

6. Australia 130.9 - 24.3m

7. Italy 1 34.8 - 60m

8. GB 215.3 - 65m

indiana wrote:

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We should add one or two more as well just so we're not bottom

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Great post!

Why not add in the likes of Burkina Faso, Iceland etc so we're always up the top?! On second thoughts, better leave Iceland out.

 

 

 
Intrigued (and tired) I thought I'd do a comparable table for women, including top 5 and top 10 averages. You can see why some teams dominate Fed Cup - the US, Russian, Czech, German and French teams are all top 5 averages within the top 50. The surprise for me was the depth of Germany, China and Japan. Then again, in terms of depth, the USA top 15 would place second (51.3) in the top 10 list, and the top 20 (68.15) are just pipped to the post by the Russian top 10.

All that said, probably some mistakes in here ... done quickly.

21.4/37.1 USA
22.4/64.7 RUS
26.4/78.2 CZE
38.8/71.1 GER
47.4/127.3 FRA
51.6/137.6 ROM
62.4/171 SPAIN
72.2/98.7 CHINA
72.8/131.6 JAPAN
76/173.4 ITA
84/187.4 SUI
92.6/187.5 SLOVAKIA
100/204.9 BEL
103.2/217.9 UKR
113.4/215.9 GBR
130.8/240.2 NED
134/231.4 AUS
136/310.6 CRO
144/328.5 SERBIA
155/386.1 BLR
169/ NA POL
250/422.2 CAN
253.6 TAIWAN

-- Edited by Spectator on Thursday 12th of January 2017 04:38:56 PM

Added Map & Table for Top 10 players from each country only.
Country requires minimum 10 ranked players to qualify; there are 43 such countries.
GB are 13th.

https://public.tableau.com/views/20170112ATPCountryStrengths/Top10PlayersPerCountry?:embed=y&:display_count=yes

With a population of 7 million or so? That's really sad .....