FIFA World Rankings
The men’s FIFA World Ranking is a ranking system for men’s national teams in association football, currently led by Belgium. The teams of the men’s member nations of FIFA, football’s world governing body, are ranked based on their game results. The rankings were introduced in December 1992, and eight teams have held the top position, of which Brazil have spent the longest ranked first. A points system is used, with points being awarded based on the results of all FIFA-recognised full international matches.
About FIFA World Rankings in brief
The men’s FIFA World Ranking is a ranking system for men’s national teams in association football, currently led by Belgium. The teams of the men’s member nations of FIFA, football’s world governing body, are ranked based on their game results with the most successful teams being ranked highest. The rankings were introduced in December 1992, and eight teams have held the top position, of which Brazil have spent the longest ranked first. A points system is used, with points being awarded based on the results of all FIFA-recognised full international matches. The ranking system has been revamped on several occasions, generally responding to criticism that the preceding calculation method did not effectively reflect the relative strengths of the national teams. FIFA announced on 10 June 2018 that the ranking system would be updated following the 2018 World Cup finals. The calculation method to be adopted will be closely modeled after the Elo rating system and rankings of its member associations will be updated on a game-by-game basis. The Cook Islands are the sole unranked FIFA member association, having been removed from the ranking in September 2019 after not playing any fixtures in the previous four years. However, the new methodology does not account for home or away games and the victory margin of the victory. FIFA had intended to introduce the new ranking system in July 2018 but with no matches scheduled between the dates, it was delayed until August 2018. There was speculation that this was because projections of the new rankings had seen relatively little change in positions, with Germany – who had been eliminated in the first round of the World Cup – remaining as the top ranked team.
When two or more teams had equal ranks in June 2018, the next highest ranked team had received the immediate greatest number of points from the value of 1600 points from June 2018 as the start, but when the starting point of August 2018 appeared, the value had been changed to an equal 1600 points between 868 and 868. The current version of the rankings was first used on 16 August 2018, adapted from the ElO rating system used in chess and Go, and is based on a procedure which is a simplified versions of the Football Elo Ratings. The changes made the rankings system more complex, but helped improve its accuracy by making it more comprehensive. The major changes were as follows: Two new awards were introduced as part of the system: the World Player of the Year award and the FIFA World Cup Golden Ball award. The evaluation period was cut from eight to four years, and a simpler method of calculation was used to determine rankings. Goals scored and home and away advantage were no longer taken into account, and other aspects of the calculations, including the importance attributed to different types of match, were revised. The first set of revised rankings and the calculation methodology were announced on 12 July 2006. The membership of FIFA has expanded from 167 to 211 since the rankings began; 210 members are currently included in the rankings. The women’s rankings were, and still are, based on an procedure which was used for other representative national sides such as women’s and junior teams, for example the FIFA Women’s World Rankings.
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This page is based on the article FIFA World Rankings published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
