Vodafone Fiji national Football side is now sixth in the Oceania region after climbing four positions on the latest FIFA World Rankings.
The side is now ranked 177th in the World FIFA rankings. Fiji was on 181 at the last rankings.
Fiji FA chief executive officer Mohammed Yusuf said this was a huge achievement for Fiji Football.
“I think this is a huge achievement for Fiji Football as we are now trying to achieve what we want,” Yusuf said.
“We are slowly moving and I think we will make it to the top in years to come.”
Yusuf said there was also more international friendlies set up for our national team and that would also be an advantage.
“We have started playing international friendlies and that is how we getting our points.”
Yusuf said there were a number of requirements to play an international friendly, but they had been doing all to get the matches arranged in the FIFA window.
“The improvement in ranking, is due to the number of international games Fiji has played this year, with the latest being against Indonesia.”
Meanwhile, Germany have returned to the summit of the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking, continuing this year’s ongoing tug of war with Brazil for top spot.
The reigning world champions have edged ahead of A Seleção following two impressive FIFA World Cup™ qualifying victories over the Czech Republic and Norway, and head a table much changed after the recent Russia 2018 preliminaries.
Belgium, for example, has climbed four places to enter the top five on the back of qualifying for next year’s finals. Portugal, for their part, are up three to third and, further down, no fewer than 23 teams have jumped ten places or more.
Among the most notable climbers are the Cape Verde Islands (67th, up 47), Luxembourg (101st, up 35), Bolivia (46th, up 22) and Denmark (26th, up 20), all on the back of stunning results in qualifying against South Africa, France, Chile and Poland respectively.
Luxembourg is also one of four teams to have reached an all-time high position in the latest ranking, along with Peru (12th, up 3), Northern Ireland (20th, up 3) and Syria (75th, up 5).
The Bolivians, meanwhile, are among five new entries in the top 50, where they are joined by Montenegro (37th, up 15), Bulgaria (38th, up 14), Scotland (43rd, up 15) and Haiti (48th, up 7).
The next FIFA rankings will be released in October.