The New FIFA rankings are out

[Mr Hanki's Throne]

http://msn.foxsports.com/soccer/story/5778948

US and Mexico drop to the second ten.

http://www.fifa.com/en/mens/statistics/index/0,2548,All-Jul-2006,00.html

Unfortunately, FIFA didn't recalculated their May rankings based on the new formula, so most of the teams show double digit ranking shifts. It'd be interesting to see how the US ranking would have changed based solely on the World Cup month based on the same formula.

[Mr Hanki's Throne]

One interesting thing to compare is how Croatia and Brazil rate in terms of points in the old system and the new system. That is because both teams held their ranking position in the shift. In the old system, Croatia had 168/803 or 20.9% of Brazil's total. In the new system, it is 854/1630 or 52.4%. I wonder if this will promote mobility in the rankings from month-to-month.

As I look further, I don't trust thier May 06 column of data, as Italy is reported with a greater total than Brazil, even though Brazil is shown to have held the #1 position in May.

[ThreeApples]

One interesting thing to compare is how Croatia and Brazil rate in terms of points in the old system and the new system. That is because both teams held their ranking position in the shift. In the old system, Croatia had 168/803 or 20.9% of Brazil's total. In the new system, it is 854/1630 or 52.4%. I wonder if this will promote mobility in the rankings from month-to-month.

As I look further, I don't trust thier May 06 column of data, as Italy is reported with a greater total than Brazil, even though Brazil is shown to have held the #1 position in May.Brazil had 827 and Croatia had 686 in May. The far right column is the difference between the current point totals and the point totals from May, which is pretty much irrelevant since they were calculated using different formulas.

[Mr Hanki's Throne]

Brazil had 827 and Croatia had 686 in May. The far right column is the difference between the current point totals and the point totals from May, which is pretty much irrelevant since they were calculated using different formulas.

OK, so the gaps are widening. It might be harder to move up and down the standings.

[ThreeApples]

OK, so the gaps are widening. It might be harder to move up and down the standings.On the other hand, I would expect much more fluctuation in each team's total, since results are removed from the rankings after 4 years rather than 8, and the most recent year is weighted much more heavily (50% instead of 22%).

[EvanJ]

I calculated the correlation between the May 2006 and July 2006 FIFA Rankings to be 0.8565275361.

[Mr Hanki's Throne]

I calculated the correlation between the May 2006 and July 2006 FIFA Rankings to be 0.8565275361.

How does that compare to correlation between April 2006 and May 2006? 0.85 seemed kind of a low correlation to me, since that a large linear trend is basically a given since Brazil was going to be in the top 5 in both rankings no matter what happened, and American Samoa was going to be in the bottom 5.

[EvanJ]

There's a problem with my correlations. The April 2006 and May 2006 rankings have 205 countries, but July 2006 has only 204. What country stopped appearing in the FIFA Rankings?

[tachyon1]

Anguilla