What Happens If You Score Worlds as a Team Meet? (FULL AQUA Team Trophy Scoring)

Thanks to SwimSwam Stat Guru Barry Revzin for compiling this data.

This week’s hot topic of discussion at the World Championships has surrounded the best way to determine which country “wins” a large international meet.

Neither the gold medal count nor the total medal count, on their own, is a particularly precise way to capture the totality. Is 1 silver medal better than 1 gold medal? Certainly not. Are 4 silver medals better than 1 gold medal? 5? 8? Where is the number?

This is where some kind of scoring system can become valuable to weighting the different results.

But even those scoring systems, while they might feel ‘objective,’ are subjective in their creation.

To award its Best Team honor, World Aquatics uses a very specific scoring system that resembles, but doesn’t match exactly, the system used by the NCAA in the United States:

FINA Trophy Scoring System:

This system does a better job of valuing depth beyond just the top three spots. The scale of this system, though, probably doesn’t recognize the relative-weight that the world puts on medals. For example, in this system, finishing 7th and 8th is better than finishing 1st and 40th, which I don’t think most viewers (casual or fanatical) would agree with.

Many countries also send intentionally-undersized rosters for the purposes of saving money or creating motivation factors for swimmers.

And still, when you look through the ranking, and sort of think about the general impression of teams’ top-to-bottom, and how those might rank out, the result sort of seems right.

Countries missing big stars (Hungary, Canada) were lower than normal; Italy didn’t have a great meet by their standards, but still is a deeper team than France – who had a couple of standouts but not much depth. The ranking feels kind of right, with a few minor quibbles.

But it is a familiar system, and the one that World Aquatics uses, so it’s still interesting to look at.

In this method, the US, which usually sends the biggest roster, has the most entries, and advances most of its swims out of prelims, wins. Which they usually do – even if they don’t have the most gold medals or total medals.

But the margin is notable and really emphasizes just how good of a meet this was for Australia.

The US beat Australia by 261.5 points. At the 2019 World Championships, the last ‘normal’ edition of the meet, the US beat Australia by 220 points.

At the 2017 edition, however, the gap between the US and the next-best team, Russia, was a whopping 404 points. That year, Australia was just 7th with 369 points.

Australia had 56 total individual swims at the meet (27 men and 29 women). That’s more than the 48 individual swims they had in 2019.

The US, meanwhile, had 33 men’s swims and 34 women’s swims in 2023 – for 67 total events.

The US, that means, averaged more points-per-swim than Australia did by about 1.5 points – though in that stat, Australia’s smaller roster helps, because it was unlikely that filling out their roster would have increased their scoring average. An equal roster wouldn’t have fully closed that gap, but it would have helped.

In total, 55 of World Aquatics’ 209 member federations scored points, meaning they had a swimmer finish top 16 in an individual event and/or a top 8 relay. If you’re ever unsure about why World Aquatics policies are the way that they are, keep that number in mind – each of the 209 federations get a vote, including the 154 that didn’t advance – among them Kuwait, the home country of World Aquatics’ president Hussain Al-Musallam.

A few notes:

• The absence of Russia always skews this data: they’re a big team that has a lot of scoring swims. That makes it hard to do a great comparison year-over-year to what countries scored previously, but it is still a good representation of the gaps between countries.
• World Aquatics hasn’t released their full scoring this year, so we did the math ourselves. We had to make assumptions on things like “what if a swimmer was 8th in the semi-finals but scratched the finals” (we put them 9th).

The Full List