Lately, decision-making in sports has fast approached data-centric methods. This trend has led to the utilisation of data analytics across various sports, including football. The current study aims to apply survival analysis to model the performance of leading national football teams when playing against teams much lower in rank. The motivation stems from the fact that when minnows face a top-tier opponent, their primary objective is to prevent the latter from scoring a goal. In such matches, the top teams often take more time than expected to score their first goal. Considering the duration until the stronger team scores its initial goal as event time, the current researchers apply parametric survival analysis models to identify and compare the strategies of top national teams while playing against the minnows. The study makes a comparative evaluation of the teams against minnows and identifies that log-normal, exponential and gamma distributions best fit the survival probability curves of the top-ranked national teams.