BEST Football National Football Team Elo Rankings
Channel: BLACK COBRA SPORT
Date: 13/10/2020

BEST Football National Football Team Elo Rankings

The Elo World Football Ranking is an unofficial ranking of the various nations playing football at the global level.

This classification appeared in dispute of the FIFA classification, considered less reliable than the classification based on the Elo method, in use in particular to classify chess players. On the other hand, the official FIFA women's world ranking is well based on the Elo method of calculation.

The Elo ranking method was developed by the American mathematician of Hungarian origin Árpád Élő (1903-1992) in the 1950s. It is used by FIDE, the International Chess Federation for the ranking of players but also by the European Go Federation. In 1997, Bob Runyan decided to adapt this method for national football1 teams and published his results on the Internet. The World Football Elo Ratings site was then created, of which he was the first administrator1. The site is now managed by Kirill Bulygin


FIFA published their first world ranking of national teams in 1993. The ranking is since then perpetually under scrutiny by fans, media and, often self-proclaimed, domain experts. The majority of criticism targets the calculation procedure and the resulting discordance between perceived quality and ranking of several nations. Belgium’s surprising rank as world number 1 in November 2015, although they had only participated in one major tournament between 2003 and 2015, is just one of many examples.

In June 2018, FIFA decided to update their ranking procedure again. The new scheme is now an adaptation of the famous Elo rating.

A critical and easily overlooked point is the infrequent match schedule. National teams only play a few relevant games a year, if at all. Determining a meaningful ranking with such a little amount of data is challenging to begin with. Thus, the question is if the observed irregularities stem from the inadequacy of the ranking scheme, or are simply an artifact of the sparse data basis.

We adapted FIFA’s ranking scheme to club-level football to see if the mentioned points of criticism also hold on a larger body of games. The world team ranking on our page should thus not be deemed as a try to accurately rank club-level football around the world, but rather as an experiment on the effectiveness of the underlying method. A more detailed description of our approach is given in the following. If you want to go directly to the ranking, use the bottom below.