By Request: Rankings of International Football Sides

[beineke]

I think that makes a certain amount of sense, though. If a team that's a lot better wins, then you haven't really learned anything new about either the winner or the loser, have you? It makes sense, then, that they would both pick up / lose something small in the exchange. On the other hand, a big upset says a lot about both winner and loser, and it makes sense that each would see a relatively larger effect on their ratings. I could see quibbling about exact values (maybe the exchange shouldn't be exactly the same), but I think it's correct on relative magnitude.

The problem is that the USA plays a lot of games, while Australia plays very few. So each USA game only gives us a small amount of new information about our team. By contrast, each Australia game provides a lot of new info.

[microbrew]

Very good work.

Just to reinforce a point: the number of teams in the World Cup has increased over the last two decades. And beineke's suggestion of using UEFA only data is a good way of getting a larger, more consistent data set.

Is there a way of collasping runaway scores? At or above, say, a four goal lead, the winning team usually lets up.

Oh, I'll take a crack at the GDP/confederation projection for the no. 1 team: the USA. No country in CONMEBOL has a larger GDP than Brazil, and no country in UEFA has a larger GDP than Germany. Only two countries have a large GDP than Germany: Japan and USA (disclaimer: add China if you adjust for purchasing power parity).

[voros]

Originally posted by microbrew
Very good work.

Just to reinforce a point: the number of teams in the World Cup has increased over the last two decades. And beineke's suggestion of using UEFA only data is a good way of getting a larger, more consistent data set.

Is there a way of collasping runaway scores? At or above, say, a four goal lead, the winning team usually lets up.
Turns out to not be a big problem. Australia has the best goal differential of any team, but doesn't appear to be overrated.

Why? Well simply because a goal scored for you is a goal scored against your opponent. Since those goals will hurt your opponents rating, they will also hurt your strength of schedule numbers in the system. So Australia pounding American Samoa 31-0 doesn't conspire to throw things off, because American Samoa's poor rating will negate most of that 31 goal outburst.

[ChrisE]

Voros, how would you use the rankings to predict the outcome of a match?

[voros]

Okay, doing some more work on the system. It turns out I overlooked something with regards to the friendly issue. The issue is that although the system did well in predicting the World Cups, that is unfortunately an unrepresentative sample of team quality. The upshot is that the worse teams play less games, and the system does not have significant sample sizes for them, so the ratings are poor. But since they're poor teams, they don't have a large effect on the World Cup Results.

So I have indeed added all friendly and minor tournament matches to the system.

Here's the weighting:

World Cup match counts as a full game.
World Cup Play in (like OFCvCONMEBOL): .95 games
World Cup Qualifier: .85 games
Euro Champ and Qual: .85 games
Other Confderation Championship and quals: .5 games
Friendly and BS tournaments: .25 games

So essentially, friendlise have a much greater effect on the ratings of teams with few games than they do against the USAs and Brazils and Germany's. That actually makes sense. Here's the top 25 as of 10/31/03:


1-Brazil..........103.34
2-Argentina.......103.30
3-Netherlands.....103.22
4-France..........103.21
5-Spain...........103.07
6-Portugal........103.02
7-Czech_Republic..102.95
8-Italy...........102.94
9-Germany.........102.86
10-England........102.82
11-Denmark........102.57
12-Turkey.........102.57
13-Mexico.........102.53
14-Sweden.........102.44
15-Romania........102.42
16-Ireland........102.41
17-Belgium........102.38
18-Uruguay........102.37
19-Croatia........102.37
20-Paraguay.......102.35
21-U.S.A..........102.31
22-Yugoslavia.....102.26
23-Colombia.......102.26
24-Russia.........102.25
25-Australia......102.21


Australia improves by a bunch as they've had some good friendly and Confed Cup results. USA drops a bit with the drop in importance of the Gold Cup, but the drop in rank is a bit misleading as you can see the gap from 21st to 14th is quite small.

Major refinements that still need to happen is to get more precise multipliers for the type of match, and that's going to require a lot more work, but should be done eventually.

When November ends, will compare how the system did versus FIFA and ELO in November matches.

[DCUPopeAndLillyFan]

I've been publishing international rankings (men and women) since 1997 at http://home.sprynet.com/~ronkessler/rankings.htm . On the men's side, my rankings have kicked FIFA's butt - study can be found at http://home.sprynet.com/~ronkessler/rnkstudy.htm .

I know these have not been updated for awhile (sorry, turbulent personal life) but you get the idea. I also use an iterative system where each team's rating is adjusted based on what an average team would be expected to get against their opposition. 50 iterations are generally enough to bring the ratings to equilibrium but I run it to 100 to be sure.

I also developed an offense and defense rating system using the same algorithm. Since two parameters are being measured, it reaches a double equilibrium - with the solution alternating on each iteration. The numbers are close enough though to just pick one. One can use these to predict outright scores in matches, but I have not published them yet.

[Elninho]

This thread's been mentioned in another forum, so I'd like to revive it.

Voros, do you have a spreadsheet or script or anything that you ran to generate the rankings? (It seems like you did, given your Brazil-Anguilla experiment.) And if so, would you mind if I were to take a look at it and try plugging in various combinations of including/excluding matches?

[scaryice]

I too would like to see your current rankings, to see how the USA and Mexico are doing compared to FIFA's.