So Where Do Those FIFA Rankings Come From, Anyway?

July 3rd, 2008 | by: Laurie |

It happens every month. FIFA’s new rankings come out, and everybody groans and says, “There is no possible way Team X is better than Team Y. Where do they get these rankings, Miss Cleo’s Psychic Hotline?”

Good question. And FIFA has the answers, in a handy-dandy five-page .pdf document, which of course reminds us in its logo that these are the Coca-Cola FIFA Men’s World Rankings. Because if they weren’t selling out to advertisers, they wouldn’t be FIFA.

The FIFA ranking system was originally conceived as a way to compare the teams in different parts of the world who might not ever play each other. And it does do that. But if you don’t know how it works, it feels pretty opaque. So here are some answers to the questions you would probably ask if you ever decided to care enough about FIFA rankings to come up with questions:

How long has FIFA been using this system?
The FIFA ranking system started out in 1992 as one big international table: Three points for a win in international competitions, one point for a draw. But it wasn’t long before folks realized that things were just a tiny bit more complicated than that. The system was revised in 1999, and then again in 2006. (A summary of the 2006 changes can be found here.)

What time period do the rankings show?
It used to be that rankings reflected performance over eight years. The obvious problem with this is that teams can change a lot in eight years. One extremely strong, team-altering player like, say, Zidane, would skew the results too high for years after his retirement. And one extremely bad patch seven or eight years ago would skew the results too low. So the current system looks at a four-year period, and this is weighted — recent games count at 100%, last year’s at 50%, two years ago at 30%, and four years ago at 20%.

Where do the points come from?

Here’s the calculation FIFA gives us: P = M x I x T x C x 100

And here’s what those things stand for:

M = Match — how the match ended.

Win (no penalty shootout) 3
Win (penalty shootout) 2
Draw 1
Loss (penalty shootout) 1
Loss (no penalty shootout) 0

I = Importance
The more significant the match, the more it counts. The assumption here being that coaches may or may not field the strongest teams in a friendly, but they certainly will in the World Cup.

Match status	Multiplier
Friendly match	x 1.0
FIFA World Cup and Continental cup qualifiers	x 2.5
Continental cup and Confederations Cup finals	x 3.0
World Cup finals match	x 4.0

T = Team The strength of the team played.
This one is a surprisingly simple weighting system based on relative FIFA ranking. Start with 200. Subtract one point for every place a team lies below first. Then divide by 100. This means that the #1 team is weighted at 2.0, #2 at 1.99, #50 at 1.50, etc. Teams ranked lower than 150th are weighted at .50.

C = Confederation.
Each confederation is weighted based on how well that confederation did in the three most recent World Cups.
Current weights (based on 2006, 2002 and 1998) are:

UEFA (Europe) = 1.0
CONMEBOL (South America) = .98
CONCACAF (North and Central America, plus some outliers) = .85
AFC (Asia) = .85
CAF (Africa) = .85
OFC (Oceania) = .85

And that’s it. It’s that simple.

The old, pre-2006 system tooked at things like home vs. away and goal differential. The current system assumes that these things are taken care of by taking into account the other factors.

If you’d like to see how this works in practice, the FIFA worksheet has several examples using real-world games like the 2006 World Cup final.

So there you have it: FIFA rankings, in a nutshell. And feel free to continue to gripe about Spain being #1 and/or Italy being #2. Now you can gripe in a semi-informed way.

(And no, I’m not going to use these calculations to show you how Spain has precisely 1557 points. What do I look like, your math teacher?)

For FIFA’s Q & A’s about how the 2006 revision affects the rankings, click here. Really, you should click there. Because how else will you ever know what Coca-Cola’s role is in the ranking system?

Alternate measurement system:

ELO rankings, which is basically the ELO chess system, modified for soccer. But that’s a topic for another time.

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http://belgium.worldcupblog.org julien

Hmm. Wasn’t the U.S. 5th in the world awhile ago with the FIFA rankings? That alone makes them lose all credibility.
http://seattle.theoffside.com Steve

the rankings are crap.

teams should be judged on a one or two year period, not a full wc cycle
http://seattle.theoffside.com Steve

the rankings are crap.

teams should be judged on a one or two year period, not a full wc cycle
don

ok, seriously, this formula makes no sense.

a quick run-through of the spain-germany final shows that spain, according to M x I x T x C x 100, won 3 x 3 x 1.94 x 1 x 100 = 1,746 points in that one game. but they only gained 254 points in the last month. and they only have 1,557 points altogether! what’s the missing step??
http://france.worldcupblog.org Laurie

Don, there’s some averaging in there too, of all the games over the past four years. I could not figure out from reading through FIFA’s examples exactly how they handle multiple games, other than that all games count. And the examples they show are for single games only.

It may be a simple matter of performing the calculation for each game and then taking a weighted average based on when the game took place. That would be my guess. It would make sense given the numbers you came up with, because the numbers from the Euro final would obviously be higher than anything other than World Cup, so the number from that game would prett much by definition be higher than an averaged, weighted score that reflects performance over time.

I’m fairly certain I could figure it out if I felt like devoting a lot of time to it. Alas, I don’t have that kind of time available. But I know there are some left-brained, engineering types who are just dying to have a go at this. If you’re out there, report back to us!
Phil M.

does the fifa ranking effect where we get placed in the world cup or does that have to do with where we qualify in our groups? If not who the fuck cares! We all know they didn’t play all the MLS players who are on fire right now in those european games which i think would have made a major impact cause they are in form compared to Bocanegra who didn’t even play much for fulham and eddie johnson who can’t hit the net in international matchs…would have loved to see ching up front for those games to making a diffrence but I think he might have been hurt.. rankings suck
ben

NERDS!
http://celtic.theoffside.com Matt

“That’s why they play the games” I believe is the saying…
http://redbulls.theoffside.com David Martinez

<============= #1 Nerdeth
http://lucrurineinteresante.blogspot.com/ Edgar

For each of the 4 years, points for individual games are added up, then divided by the number of games played in that year. Then they apply the weighting (0.2, 0.3, 0.5, 1) for every year – and you have the final number.

This is how the top 50 of the August ranking should look like: http://lucrurineinteresante.blogspot.com/2008/07/fifa-ranking-probable-top-50-in-august.html

Yes, I’m an engineer type :)
http://france.worldcupblog.org Laurie

Thanks, Edgar! That’s exactly what I would have guessed.
Weston

lets all gripe in a semi-informed way!