World Football Elo Ratings

The World Football Elo Ratings are a ranking system for men's national association football teams that is published by the website eloratings.net.

Top 20 rankings as of 21 March 2024
Rank Change Team Points
1 Steady World Football Elo Ratings Argentina 2138
2 Increase 1 World Football Elo Ratings France 2110
3 Increase 2 World Football Elo Ratings Portugal 2036
4 Increase 2 World Football Elo Ratings Spain 2033
5 Increase 3 World Football Elo Ratings England 2015
6 Decrease 4 World Football Elo Ratings Brazil 2012
7 Increase 6 World Football Elo Ratings Uruguay 2007
8 Increase 3 World Football Elo Ratings Belgium 1990
9 Increase 3 World Football Elo Ratings Colombia 1984
10 Decrease 6 World Football Elo Ratings Netherlands 1970
11 Decrease 1 World Football Elo Ratings Croatia 1952
12 Decrease 5 World Football Elo Ratings Italy 1943
13 Decrease 4 World Football Elo Ratings Germany 1886
13 Increase 7 World Football Elo Ratings Ecuador 1886
15 Increase 7 World Football Elo Ratings Ukraine 1857
16 Increase 2 World Football Elo Ratings Japan 1851
17 Increase 17 World Football Elo Ratings Austria 1835
18 Increase 3 World Football Elo Ratings Hungary 1834
19 Increase 4 World Football Elo Ratings Mexico 1826
20 Decrease 6 World Football Elo Ratings Denmark 1825
*Change from one year ago
Complete rankings at eloratings.net

It is based on the Elo rating system but includes modifications to take various football-specific variables into account, like the margin of victory, importance of a match, and home field advantage. Other implementations of the Elo rating system are possible and there is no single nor any official Elo ranking for football teams.

Since being developed, the Elo rankings have been found to have the highest predictive capability for football matches. FIFA's official rankings, both the FIFA World Rankings for men and the FIFA Women's World Rankings are based on a modified version of the Elo formula, the men's rankings having switched away from FIFA's own system for matches played since June 2018.

History and overview

The Elo system, developed by Hungarian-American mathematician Árpád Élő, is used by FIDE, the international chess federation, to rate chess players, and by the European Go Federation, to rate Go players. In 1997, Bob Runyan adapted the Elo rating system to international football and posted the results on the Internet. He was also the first maintainer of the World Football Elo Ratings web site, currently maintained by Kirill Bulygin. Other implementations of the Elo rating system are possible.

The Elo system was adapted for football by adding a weighting for the kind of match, an adjustment for the home team advantage, and an adjustment for goal difference in the match result.

The ratings consider all official international matches for which results are available. Ratings tend to converge on a team's true strength relative to its competitors after about 30 matches. Ratings for teams with fewer than 30 matches are considered provisional.

Comparison with other systems

A 2009 comparative study of eight methods found that the implementation of the Elo rating system described below had the highest predictive capability for football matches, while the men's FIFA ranking method (2006–2018 system) performed poorly.

The FIFA World Rankings is the official national teams rating system used by the international governing body of football. The FIFA Women's World Rankings system has used a modified version of the Elo formula since 2003. In June 2018, the FIFA ranking switched to an Elo-based ranking as well, starting from the current FIFA rating points. The major difference between the World Football Elo Rating and the new men's FIFA rating system is that the latter does not consider goal differential and counts a penalty shoot-out as a win/loss rather than a draw (neither method distinguishes a win in extra time from a win in regular time).

Calculation principles

The ratings are based on the following formula:

    World Football Elo Ratings 

where

    World Football Elo Ratings 

Where;

World Football Elo Ratings  = The new team rating
World Football Elo Ratings  = The old team rating
World Football Elo Ratings  = Weight index regarding the tournament of the match
World Football Elo Ratings  = A number from the index of goal differences
World Football Elo Ratings  = The result of the match
World Football Elo Ratings  = The expected result
World Football Elo Ratings  = Points Change

"Points Change" is rounded to the nearest integer before updating the team rating.

Status of match

The status of the match is incorporated by the use of a weight constant. The constant reflects the importance of a match, which, in turn, is determined entirely by which tournament the match is in; the weight constant for each major tournament is:

Tournament or Match type K
World Cup, Olympic Games (1908–1980) 60
Continental championship and intercontinental tournaments 50
World Cup and Continental qualifiers and major tournaments 40
All other tournaments 30
Friendly matches 20

The FIFA adaptation of the Elo rating features 8 weights, with the knockout stages in the World Cup weighing 12 times more than some friendly matches.

Number of goals

The number of goals is taken into account by use of a goal difference index.

If the game is a draw or is won by one goal

    World Football Elo Ratings 

If the game is won by two goals

    World Football Elo Ratings 

If the game is won by three or more goals:

  • Where N is the goal difference (World Football Elo Ratings  N ≥ 3)
    World Football Elo Ratings 

Table of examples:

Goal Difference 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6 +7 +8 +9 +10
G 1 1 1.5 1.75 1.875 2 2.125 2.25 2.375 2.5 2.625

Result of match

W is the result of the game (1 for a win, 0.5 for a draw, and 0 for a loss). This also holds when a game is won or lost in extra time. If the match is decided on penalties, however, the result of the game is considered a draw (W = 0.5).

Expected result of match

We is the expected result (win expectancy with a draw counting as 0.5) from the following formula:

    World Football Elo Ratings 

where dr equals the difference in ratings (add 100 points for the home team). So dr of 0 gives 0.5, of 120 gives 0.666 to the higher-ranked team and 0.334 to the lower, and of 800 gives 0.99 to the higher-ranked team and 0.01 to the lower.

The FIFA adaptation of the Elo rating does not incorporate a home team advantage and has a larger divisor in the formula (600 vs 400), making the points exchange less sensitive to the rating difference of two teams.

Examples for clarification

The same example of a three-team friendly tournament on neutral territory is used as on the FIFA World Rankings page. Beforehand team A had a rating of 630 points, team B 500 points, and teams C 480 points.
The first table shows the points allocations based on three possible outcomes of the match between the strongest team A, and the somewhat weaker team B:

Team A Team B Team A Team B Team A Team B
Score 3–1 1–3 2–2
World Football Elo Ratings  20 20 20 20 20 20
World Football Elo Ratings  1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1 1
World Football Elo Ratings  1 0 0 1 0.5 0.5
World Football Elo Ratings  0.679 0.321 0.679 0.321 0.679 0.321
Total (P) +9.63 -9.63 -20.37 +20.37 -3.58 +3.58

When the difference in strength between the two teams is less, so also will be the difference in points allocation. The next table illustrates how the points would be divided following the same results as above, but with two roughly equally ranked teams, B and C, being involved:

Team B Team C Team B Team C Team B Team C
Score 3–1 1–3 2–2
World Football Elo Ratings  20 20 20 20 20 20
World Football Elo Ratings  1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1 1
World Football Elo Ratings  1 0 0 1 0.5 0.5
World Football Elo Ratings  0.529 0.471 0.529 0.471 0.529 0.471
Total (P) +14.13 -14.13 -15.87 +15.87 -0.58 +0.58

See also

References

Tags:

World Football Elo Ratings History and overviewWorld Football Elo Ratings Calculation principlesWorld Football Elo Ratings

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