FIFA Rank vs. WGF Rank

We have rankings all over this site.  They are on the individual team pages, the rankings, the fixtures.  We refer to them frequently in blog posts and on Twitter.  Follow us @We_Global by the way.  We believe that these rankings are far more representative of a nation’s strength than the FIFA rankings, and we believe you should feel the same way.

We Global Football initially started out as an idea bred from frustration with the inconsistencies the FIFA ranking employs.  Firstly, FIFA releases rankings only once a month.  We Global Football rankings are updated DAILY.  If you want to know where your team stands after a hotly contested fixture, why wait an entire month to see the impact?  As far as a formula, FIFA’s five factors are:

1. How strong was your opponent?

2. What was the result?

3. What confederation is the team in?

4. How important was the match?

5. When was the match played?

Right off the bat there are enormous missing pieces from this equation.  There is no regard to where the match was played.  Whether it was home, neutral or a road match does not matter to FIFA.  Additionally, there is no sense of how much a team won by.  FIFA gives tremendous bias to UEFA and CONMEBOL, which is understandable as they are the two strongest confederations, but it unfairly rewards the poor teams in those confederations and unfairly penalizes strong teams in weaker confederations.

Here’s an example.  Switzerland is currently ranked #14 and Mexico is currently ranked #15.  Switzerland is in UEFA and Mexico is in CONCACAF.  If a team defeats Switzerland at home 2-1, it is worth more in FIFA’s eyes than if a team wins 3-0 at Mexico.  That is just fundamentally wrong.  The win over Mexico is more impressive, and a ranking system should reflect that.  You don’t need to apply continental bias to know that.

One additional piece which slips through the cracks is how losses are all weighted as 0. In FIFA’s eyes, a 1-0 loss at Brazil is the same as a 3-0 home defeat to Papua New Guinea. Both of these results would be worthless. But these losses are not equal and should not be counted that way. We address this issue.

This brings us to the strange issue of “How important was the match?”  Currently Brazil sits at #18 in the World Rankings.  They are not gaining many points in FIFA’s eyes because they are only playing friendlies.  Perhaps the fact that as hosts of the World Cup 2014, they are unable to participate in qualifying is the reason they’re only playing friendlies.  Don’t penalize a team for that.  I get that teams do not always send their top players into friendlies, but this application can make a ranking system completely invalid.  We count all matches equally.

Lastly, FIFA includes matches for 4 calendar years.  While they are discounted, including all of this data from so long ago seems counter-intuitive.  People want to know where a team stands right now.  What a team did at the beginning of 2009 has absolutely no bearing on this.  We Global Football uses a rolling 18 month schedule where all matches are counted equally.  Everything before 18 months is worth 0% and everything since is worth 100%.

The WGF rankings system wants to know the important details.  The five factors are:

1. How strong was your opponent?

2. What was the result?

3. What was the margin of victory?

4. Where was the match played?

5. When was the match played?

These are truly the important metrics to see where a team stands.  We feel we have created an algorithm that appropriately weights these components and provides nations the ranking they deserve.  Stay glued to We Global Football to get the latest rankings, fixtures, and all other information you’d want to know about your favorite team.  Perhaps some of the fury you’ve experience can be alleviated through our system.

Yours in WGF,

Cro