So Where Do Those FIFA Rankings Come From, Anyway?

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.

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.