1. Top 100

2. List of number-one teams
    Ranking by matches played as leader 

3. All-time team highs and lows

4. Average ratings
    Highest average over entire team history  Highest average ratings since 1970  Averages by decade 

5. Highest rated matches

6. Biggest upsets

7. Elo Ratings before each World Championship

8. History and overview
    Comparison with other systems 

9. Calculation principles
    Status of match  Number of goals  Result of match  Expected result of match  Examples for clarification 

10. See also

11. Notes

12. References

13. External links

The World Football Elo Ratings is a ranking system for men's national association football teams that is published by the website 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.^[1] 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.^[2]

Top 100

The following table shows the top 100 teams in the World Football Elo Ratings as they were on 1 April 2019, using data from the World Football Elo Ratings web site.^[3]

List of number-one teams

The following is the list of nations who have achieved the number-one position in the World Football Elo Ratings since the first international match in 1872:^[5]

Ranking by matches played as leader

All-time team highs and lows

The following is a list of national football teams ranked by the highest Elo rating they ever reached.^[7] The table also includes the highest ranking as well as the lowest rating and ranking reached by each nation. The team that has achieved the highest rank in each confederation is shown in color.

Average ratings

Time averaged Elo or Elo-like scores are routinely used to compare chess player strengths.^[9][10][11]

Highest average over entire team history

Highest average ratings since 1970

This table is a list of the national teams with the highest average Elo score over approximately the last half century, from 1 January 1970 to 1 January 2019. Before this time intercontinental play was fairly limited and many nations in Africa, North America, and Asia had played too few games yet to create a representative Elo score. Only teams playing over the entire period are included. Short-lived or recently originated strong football teams, like East-Germany and Croatia, appear in the decades table below.

Averages by decade

The table below shows the teams with the best average Elo score per decade (Jan 1 XXX0 - Dec 31 XXX9).

Highest rated matches

A list of the 25 matches between teams with the highest combined Elo ratings (the nations' points before the matches are given).

Biggest upsets

This is a list of matches with the biggest point exchange.^[12] Since the importance of the match, the goal differential and the perceived home team advantage are factored in the exchange, these are not necessarily the most surprising wins as expressed by the difference in Elo rating.{{efn|In those terms, most surprising may have been the 2:1 win of Luxembourg (Elo rating 1036) over Switzerland (ER 1794) in a World Cup qualification match in September 2008 (a 758 point difference). In another World Cup qualifier in October 2004 Liechtenstein (ER 1049) held the 853 points higher rated Portuguese team (ER 1902) to a 2:2 draw.}}

• The initial ratings may be partially responsible for the high point exchange. The national teams of China, Egypt, Russia, and South Korea had played only 18, 3, 2, and 18 international matches before their respective upsets. China had only yet played against East Asian teams.
  

Elo Ratings before each World Championship

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.^[34] 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 ^[35] but the Runyan system is the best known.

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 factors taken into consideration when calculating a team's new rating are:

• The team's old rating
• The considered weight of the tournament
• The goal difference of the match
• The result of the match
• The expected result of the match

The different weights of competitions in descending order are:

• World Cup Finals
• Continental championships finals and Intercontinental tournaments
• World Cup and Continental championship qualifiers
• All other tournaments
• Friendly matches

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.^[36] 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. ^[35]

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.^[37] 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; thus, a 7:0 blowout is considered equal to a 7:6 penalty shoot-out win (neither method distinguishes a win in extra time from a win in regular time). The FIFA method is also less sensitive to the difference in ratings and more sensitive to match status.^[38] Finally, World Football Elo Ratings considers all official international matches for which results are available, including those involving "unaffiliated" teams that are not a member of FIFA.

Calculation principles