Archive for category: Ireland

Eurovision is heading to the third decade of the 21st century and it has clearly changed not only in comparison with the past, but also with the recent years. In this article we investigate how countries scored during the first 2 years of the 20s, as well as their average score.

As you can see below, we cannot identify a group of 5-6 performing performing always well, as it used to happen the last years. Only a few countries are consistently doing well, despite the fact that the scores studied are only of the last 2 years. Tougher competition, the success of the contest on social media (TikTok had a business partnership with the contest this year featuring exclusive clips of the first rehearsals on the platform), as well as the high interest by record labels are only some of the reasons why it is harder to perform consistently well, since entries are of higher lever than the past.

Lets see in detail the average score of the countries during this decade:

Country        2022   2021    Average

1. Ukraine           1          5             3
2. Italy                 6          1            3,5
3. Greece             8         10            9
4. Sweden           4         14             9
5. Russia             –           9             9
6. Switzerland    17        3             10
7. Moldova          7        13            10
8. Serbia              5         15            10
9. Portugal          9         12           10.5
10. Lithuania       14         8             11
11. France            24         2             13
12. Spain               3         24           13.5
13. Iceland          23          4            13.5
14. Finland          21          6            13.5
15. United Kingdom 2     26           14
16. Norway           10         18            14
17. The Netherlands 11     23          17
18. Azerbaijan     16          20            18
19. Belgium          19         19             19
20. Armenia         20          –              20
21. Malta               35          7             21
22. Estonia           13         31             22
23. Poland            12         33            22.5
24. Cyprus            29         16            22.5
25. Romania        18          28            23
26. Israel              30          17           23.5
27. Albania          28          21           24.5
28. Australia        15          34           24.5
29. Bulgaria         38          11           24.5
30. Germany        25          25            25
31. Croatia           26          27           26.5
32. St. Marino     33          22           27.5
33. Czech Republic 22     36             29
34. Denmark        31         29             30
35. North Macedonia 27 35             31
36. Austria           36         30             33
37. Ireland           34         37            35.5
38. Latvia             32         39            35.5
39. Slovenia         40        32              36
40. Montenegro   37         –                37
41. Georgia           39       38             38.5

As you can see in the table above, there are very few countries where the average of their positions in these two years is below 10. This proves how difficult it has become to be in the top ten. It is even more difficult to have continuous results within top 10, since only three countries have achieved this, Ukraine, Italy and Greece!

It is evident that Italy and Ukraine are the two powerhouses of the competition for this decade (so far). Sweden remains high on the list, but far from the first place it was in the last decade. Greece is recovering dynamically since it is in third place, when in the previous decade it was out of the 20s. Cyprus gets lower scores year by year, unfortunately making us believe that 2018 was just a coincidence and is currently in 24th place!

Regardless of personal taste and opinions, the numbers speak themselves and is clear that Ukraine, Italy and Greece are doing great during this decade. The new strategy of the management of ERT to chose the artist and the song internally, is proven to be successful, after years of bad results and 2 NQ (2016,2018).

Stay tuned on Eurovisionfun because the journey to Eurovision 2023 has already begun!