The Worst Performing Eurovision Countries

In this blog post I will explain how I have calculated which countries have performed worst in the Eurovision Song Contest. The statistics are the basis for my quiz Lowest Ranking Eurovision Countries. If you haven't read my earlier blog entry, The Best Performing Eurovision Countries, you might want to read that one first.

In The Best Performing Eurovision Countries I had calculated the average placement of each country in the contest, 2004-2021. So one might think that I should just take the bottom ones from that data set to make the Lowest Ranking Eurovision Countries quiz. But there is a problem with that.

The poorest performing countries should be the ones that have often come near the last position, but since there are always a different number of participants, one can't say how manyeth position the last one is. So one needs to start counting from the bottom. The following example is from the 2005 contest.

In 2005 Lithuania ended last at 38^th place. I have decided to rank the last place as number 0, because it is 0 positions away from the last place. The second last is number 1, because it is 1 position away from the last position, and so on.

If we had counted from the top down, as in the best performing countries' quiz, Lithuania would have gotten rank 38 in 2005, but 2010's loser, Switzerland, would have gotten rank 32. But when we count from the bottom up, Lithuania 2005 and Switzerland 2010 both get the same rank.

After compiling all my data it turned out that the way of counting did affect the results. When I compared the order of countries in the worst set to the ones in the best set, some countries had changed places.

2004-2007 the contest had one semi-final and a final. As number 0 I have ranked the country that came last in the semi-final, as number 1 the country that came second last, and so on, for all countries that did not qualify from the semi-final. The rest of the countries I have ranked according to in what place they finished in the final.

From 2008 onward the show has consisted of two semi-finals and a final. I have decided to rank the last place in both semis as rank 0, the second last place in both semis as number 1, etc. So all the countries that did not qualify from their semi-final are tied with another country.

Well, almost all. In some years one semi had one more participant than the other. For example in Eurovision 2009 there were 18 countries in semi-final 1 and 19 countries in semi-final 2 (see tables below). That means eight non-qualifying countries in semi-final 1, that I have ranked 0 to 7, and nine non-qualifying countries in semi-final 2, that I have ranked 0 to 8. Then there are the finalists, which I have ranked 9 to 33.

There are many more details pertaining to all of this, but since I have already mentioned them in my previous blog entry, I will not bore you with that.

I'm not sure how often I will update the Lowest and Best Performing Eurovision Countries quizzes. Adding more data every year would not be that much work really. Though maybe I'll skip updating the quizzes if there has been no change in which countries appear among the 15 best/worst.