{"id":44496,"date":"2021-12-23T08:41:44","date_gmt":"2021-12-23T16:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=44496"},"modified":"2021-12-23T08:41:44","modified_gmt":"2021-12-23T16:41:44","slug":"iran-ends-2021-as-asias-top-team-in-fifa-rankings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2021\/12\/23\/iran-ends-2021-as-asias-top-team-in-fifa-rankings\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran ends 2021 as Asia&#8217;s top team in FIFA rankings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Tehran Times &#8211; ZURICH, <strong>Iran national football team ended the 2021 year as Asia&#8217;s best-ranked team, following the latest FIFA World Ranking announced on Thursday.\u00a0Iran remains 21st in the FIFA World Ranking.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the fourth year in a row, Belgium (1st) ends the calendar year in pole position, albeit only just ahead of Brazil (2nd) by 2.1 points. France (3rd) complete the podium for 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, only 352 full internationals were played in 2020. Not since 1987 (323 matches) had so few games been played in a calendar year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By contrast, planet football made up for lost time in 2021 with a record-breaking 1116 matches played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The next FIFA World Ranking will be published on Feb. 10, 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tehran Times &#8211; ZURICH, Iran national football team ended the 2021 year as Asia&#8217;s best-ranked&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26307,"featured_media":20758,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84,92,86,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions","category-c47-featured-news","category-c21-international-football-news","category-c13-team-melli-news","category-world-cup"],"views":1959,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44497,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44496\/revisions\/44497"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}