Well, four years is a WC cycle. the only functional purpose for the ranking is for seeding the pods in a WC, so it makes a little sense. Any team hopeing to get into a WC is going to have to at least go through Qualifiers, presumably against other ranked teams. If those are the only matches it plays, It can only rise depending on the teams it beats in its confederation.
Associations/Nations not ranked currently: (*no active women's national team) AFC: Brunei* Cambodia Iraq Kuwait Macau Oman* Pakistan Qatar Saudi Arabia* Syria Timor-Leste Turkmenistan Yemen* CAF: Cape Verde Central African Republic Chad Djibouti Eritrea Gambia Guinea-Bissau Libya Mauritania Sao Tome y Principe Seychelles Somalia* Sudan Togo UEFA: Gibraltar Liechtenstein San Marino* CONCACAF: Anguilla Bahamas British Virgin Islands Cayman Islands Montserrat*
In case anyone's curious, the question about Philippines and their anticipated rise in the ratings came up after they defeated Chinese Taipei on PKs to qualify for the World Cup and advance to the semi-finals of the Asian Cup. Rough back-of-the-envelope calculations show Philippines gaining about 50 rating points, from roughly 1385 to roughly 1435. If everyone else's ratings were frozen in place, it would take Philippines to 54th place between Cameroon and Belarus. Their performance rating in the Asian Cup up to the semi-finals is roughly 1600, which is right between Thailand's rating and Chinese Taipei's, the 38th and 39th ranked teams. That is, their results are what would've been predicted for Thailand and Chinese Taipei, teams rated just about 1600.
Also worth reminding people: -advancement in a knockout tournament is not what earns teams rating points; wins are -drawing an opponent is (obviously) not worth as much as outright beating them, and PKs do not count as wins for the rankings -earning a result against a team near you in the rankings is not worth much compared to beating a team above you ^those are the reasons why the Philippines' rating will not go up much based on their current performance. They would need consistent results against teams in that 30-ish range for themselves to rise into the 30-ish range.
Yeah, the "consistent" part is the key. If you only get 30-ish-rank results twice in five years and otherwise perform worse, your ranking will be worse. But if you're getting 30-ish-rank results in half of your matches, with some better results and some worse, that's what proves you should be ranked in the 30s.
The Philippine women will have plenty of chances to get results from that 30ish range this year as they are competing in 3 tournaments this year along with any friendlies scheduled along the way. Those are the SEA Games in May, AFF Women's Championship in July , and the Asian Games in September. However they will not be able to call up many of their pro players from Europe in some of this tournaments because they are outside the FIFA calendar as well as some of their current US based NCAA college students who are in the middle of their school soccer schedule which will affect their ability to raise their FIFA rankings consistently. Fortunately they do have a big pool of US and Philippine College grads and elite high school players that they can call upon to replace those when necessary.
I don't know if any of those tournaments count more than friendlies, though. (I don't think they do but I could be wrong) To gain 50 points from 4 games is very good and of course it's because this tournament's matches, as World Cup qualifiers, count 3X the typical friendly. Against South Korea, the Philippines will be major underdogs (about 400 rating points). My back-of-the-envelope calculation estimates that even if they lose by 6 or more goals, the most they can lose in the ratings is 3 or 4 points from this match.
I didn't know getting a result from today's match against S Korea would provide them so many points. It gives me even more hope that they do accomplish the upset. Last game they played against Korea was in the 2019 AFC Asian Women's Cup which they lost 0-5 in the battle for 5th place and the final spot in the FIFA WWC. The Philippines has a much better, disciplined and organized team this time though.
Hmmm @kolabear I'm curious... Have you ever tried making performance-adjusted performance rankings? That is, take a window of results, calculate the performances rankings of all teams involved based on the previous official FIFA ratings, then re-do the performance calculations based on the first round of performance ratings.
Interesting idea. Probably the closest I've come to that is when I've used recent performance ratings for teams from Africa in calculating performance ratings of all teams at the World Cup or Olympics — the official ratings for teams from Africa being notoriously unreliable. Perhaps it makes sense to also do it for some teams in the middle of a meteoric rise. I don't recall if I've done that before for teams outside Africa but I may do it for Northern Ireland at the Euros this summer.
In case anyone is curious after seeing the first round of results from the February tournaments... Despite the feels-like-a-loss draw the USA had against low-ranked Czech Rep. and Sweden getting a free win over Denmark, the chances of the top two in the rankings swapping after these tournaments is still quite low. It's certainly possible, but it will basically require repeats of the first round. USA and SWE were 30pts apart in the previous rankings. Since they are both the only top-ten teams in their respective tournaments, no match will be worth more than 15pts, and both teams have their "expected results" of at least 75% per match, so wins will be worth at most 4pts - which hampers SWE's ability to climb, (particularly with low-ranked Portugal,) meaning they can only gain about 10pts from Algarve, and can't get that if their "actual results" aren't as close to 100% as they could be. And even if USA's draw still feels like a loss, it's also going to be a drop of at most 6pts (i.e. a drop from expected of ~90% to actual of ~50%). TL;DR - in order for this window to see SWE and USA swap, SWE needs to do win by at least 3 (preferably more) in all three of their matches *and* USA needs to get no more than 2pts from their three matches. (Now, the following window, when both teams have official qualifying matches to play - that's when to watch.)
Thanks, I was indeed curious. As much as I'd like a change at the top (not necessarily in the name of an anti-USWNT bias, more for the sake of difference), the chance Italy has to be in the final at Algarve makes me refrain from hoping that Sweden wins it by 3-0. I'll happily wait for the next round of qualifiers.
Does a cancelled friendly (Sweden - Denmark) count for the rankings? Has Germany got points for the ranking when Italy didn`t play the final of the Algarve Cup in 2020?
IIRC, a Sweden-Denmark WC19 qualifier that was cancelled still counted for the rankings, so yes I believe so.
As much as I would like to see Sweden at the top I don't think it would feel right under the circumstances of the Algarve Cup even if Sweden was lucky/strong enough to beat a potential final foe Italy by 3-0.
The World Cup qualifier was cancelled because the Danish players refused to play after problems with their federation. To use this awarded 3:0 for the rankings makes sense but Algarve Cup with regard to rankings are just friendlies played in a tournament. The game is only awarded 3:0 to Sweden because it is necessary to find the finalists. If this would have been just a friendly(that is not part of a tournament) nobody would say we award Sweden a win. In October 2020 England cancelled a friendly against Germany after a positive covid test. I never heard that Germany was awarded a win for this. Would you think it would be fair if USA cancels a friendly against Tahiti that USA lose many ranking points?
I don't disagree with the take on "just a friendly" vs "friendly tournament". The point here, though, is not whether the win *should* have been awarded, but rather that Sweden *was* awarded the 3-0 win. FIFA's ranking system already accounts for match importance, so with that in mind, I see no reason to treat a 3-0 forfeit in an "important" competition any differently than a 3-0 forfeit for a friendly. I don't know how that ENG-GER match was recorded in official statistics, but to answer your question - I personally think that if game is cancelled close enough to game time that preparations (such as travel) have already been under way, then yes, whoever was responsible for cancelling the game deserves a penalty by being awarded the loss that would then affect the rankings. So if the USA decided to play a game against Tahiti, and it was close enough to game time that Tahiti was already in the USA when the USA suddenly says "nah", then that's just rude and the USA deserves to lose the 12pts or so from the associated 3-0 loss. In terms of how FIFA handles things, I think the difference in general is the difference between a cancelled game and a forfeited game. I think if a game is cancelled (i.e. with enough lead time) and not given a score, it's impossible to include in the rankings. A forfeited game is given a score, though, and thus I don't see any reason to not include it in the ranking.
An important point is who awarded the win. I doubt that it was FIFA who awarded the win for Sweden in the Algarve Cup but more likely the tournament organizer.
I don't think FIFA directly hands out results much? I thought it was always at the discretion of whatever organization is operating things - e.g. most qualifiers are run by the continental confederations. As long as any competition/match is recognized by FIFA - and essentially everything between two FIFA-recognized NTs is, especially any in official windows - then I don't think it matters who the organizers are in terms of certifying the score. And I can't say I've ever heard of FIFA contradicting any announced score save for situations involving rule-breaking...
Algarve Cup originally had 45 minutes matches planned so would you at least agree that these results would have not counted for FIFA rankings? We will see in March when the next rankings are out if the Sweden vs Denmark match is included.
Never really understood the ranking system. Thought that a switch at the top would come at the end of 2021 when the US had dropped a couple of points (South Korea, Australia) and Sweden had won 6 straight matches (5 qualifiers). But none of Sweden's matches were against top 20 teams whereas the US dropped points against 2 top 20 teams.
oh absolutely - if it's not 90min, it wouldn't qualify as one of FIFA's "A" grade matches or whatever the official term is. Interestingly, I found the answer to one of your previous questions - the ITA-GER game from two years ago was declared a walkover victory for GER by the Algarve organizer, i.e. a win with no score attached to it, so thus it couldn't have been included in the rankings. ...also, I realized that this whole argument is a bit silly, since the original point of "SWE isn't going to gain much from Algarve" only becomes even more true if the SWE-DEN match is ignored. If it is thrown out for whatever reason, it only enhances the original point. Well, you already have the basic grasp in that changes in points may or may not lead to changes in rank. I think the important thing to consider is you have to account for *all* matches played in a given window. For the USA in the last window, yes they were drawn by KOR and AUS, but they also won four times, including the other matches against KOR and AUS. On balance, then, they only lost a single point from their six matches in the window, with the size of the wins providing most of the offset - especially considering that both AUS matches were in AUS, making the draw there a relatively expected result and the win a big points gain. SWE lost points (only a handful though) in the last window because most of their opponents were weak enough - as you note, all outside the top 20, and everyone save SCO quite far outside - that SWE were expected to get blowout wins, even in their away matches. Thus, even though they won every single match, they underperformed more than they overperformed, which is why they lost a few points. And that's the other important thing to remember about the rankings - it's possible to drop points with a win (or gain points with a loss) if the match is much closer than it was expected to be.