From time to time I say something in connection with the Fink Tank, something I find entirely obvious, and am taken by surprise. Instead of greeting my banal point with a small nod of the head, my interlocutor is outraged.

I have had this reaction when asserting that Frank Lampard is a good player (which is clear to the naked eye, let alone to a man with a computer). I have had it when arguing that the team who win the Barclays Premier League title are not necessarily the best in the league (which can be shown fairly simply). But I have never had it more often than with this assertion — that the ability of international teams is related to the size of population.

If you think about it for a moment, this is bound to be true. The more people who live in a place, the more likely you are to discover a football talent among them. What puts people off is that the law is not an iron one. Holland are a good football side; China are not. Nevertheless, the relationship between people and footballing power is a strong one.

I don’t expect you to trust me. Dr Henry Stott and Dr Ian Graham have been crunching the numbers.

The first thing that leaps out of the calculation is that Brazil are far, far better than anyone else. It is as if Manchester United faced no Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool, just Tottenham Hostpur. It is only because of this dominance that South America is the strongest footballing continent. Without Brazil, European nations would be of the same average strength as South American ones — pretty impressive, given that the large number of small nations in Europe pulls down the average.

The relationship between population and the strength of the international team is positive and significant. There are, however, diminishing returns to scale. If you are a very big nation, adding one million to your population will not improve your national team much. If you are a small country, it just might. You can breed your way to success, but if you are a medium-size nation, it will take you for ever.

The next thing we wondered was whether wealth had anything to do with it. Poor nations may not have the time or energy to commit to football, so affluent ones may do better. And so it proved. The greater the gross domestic product (GDP) per head, the greater the strength of the team. This GDP effect is as strong as the population effect.

All this allows us to predict which nation we would expect to be the best in the world, based on its population and its wealth. The answer? The United States, of course. If football ran in the blood there, the team would be very hard indeed to stop. Perhaps we should not be trying so hard to make them take it up.

The graphic shows how well countries do at football compared with how well their natural resources suggest they should do. Brazil, Argentina, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Spain and Ivory Coast greatly outstrip the population and GDP constraints of their nations.

And England? Yes, we outperform expectations, too. We do so less than France and Germany, but more than Portugal and Italy. Wales and Scotland do better than expected, but not by much. Northern Ireland come in on the line. And now I will stand back and let you all shout at me.