The first tournament was held in 1991 in China. Nine have now been held and under the @/WC column, the number of times a country has participated is shown. To rank how nations have performed, I created the chart you see below. So how does it work?
Points are allocated according to where teams finished each World Cup and those points are added together in the 'Tot' column.
The 'Avg' figure is arrived at by dividing the 'Tot' number with the @/WC one. So a country that has done well when they did attend will have a higher average figure than those performing poorly when they attended, regardless of how often they did so.
The lowest part of the chart reveals how each region did. The three rows show - total points accrued, the number of nations each region sent and finally the average points. As the number of participating countries increases, the points do not increase at the same rate so average points reduce with additional countries being admitted.
Taking the Americas as an example, it started with just two countries and had the highest average of 10 points each. In 2024, with nine countries it had the lowest average per nation of 2.4. I wonder if the organisers will react to that or view it as a long term project where the experience gained will rectify that next time.
Summary: The USA is clearly the most successful country, ahead of Germany. That despite neither doing that well in the 2023 event. England, the Netherlands and Spain have missed some tournaments but both have been successful when attending. New Zealand is notable for the opposite reason.
