By the way, maybe I am looking a little too much excited, but... when exactly the next FIFA Women'd Rankings are supposed to be published?
Oh, that's a shame: they could have considered demolishing St. Kitts & Nevis by 25-0 or something of the kind, if it had given them any chance.
Correct; USA+GER have collectively held an iron grip on not just #1 but #2 as well, with GER only dropping to #3 for a total of six or seven releases ever
And friendlies between 2 teams of FIFA top 10 are weighted two times (X2) i wonder how will be weighted matches of the future UEFA women's nations league. I didn"t find any information about that, but i think it may be X2. The nations league will start next autum, it could be still more points for the european countries at the expense of UsA, Brazil, Australia etc...
ENG can definitely stay above USA with a win, but I was curious about #1, and I'm actually thinking that ENG might not be able to pass SWE at all... Remember how I docked points from GER for their woeful tune-up matches? ENG drew twice to lower-ranked teams, including against fellow top-tean side CAN (meaning the game was worth 2x the points of a normal friendly) so they were at a deficit versus SWE going into the final match... And SWE's 2-0 win was an "actual result" of 0.92, leaving little room for ENG to get an even better "actual result" against ESP - I think it would have to be an absolute rout for ENG to take #1.
I would guess 2x as well (for a weight of 30). For reference: in the men's game, friendlies are either worth a weight of 5 or 10 (in or out of official windows), NL matches are 15 or 25 (group stage or finals), and continental matches are 35 or 40 (group stage or knockouts). It makes me wonder if a re-write of the women's rankings might be necessary anyway, especially with C'CAF starting up their W Gold Cup (that was originally called a NL before the branding came out) as a compliment to the official continental championship tournament. Considering the NL structure that keeps nations playing similarly-strength opponents, though, I don't think the net effect would be to benefit top UEFA sides as they'd mostly be swapping points between each other instead of a net gain.
I made some back-of-the-envelope calculations (it took several envelopes) to get a peek at what happens to some of Africa's ratings if FIFA re-calculated the ratings, using asymmetrical weighting as I mentioned above. Taking Nigeria, for instance, in isolation and doubling the multiplier for their games against non-African teams — beginning with the 2003 World Cup and ending with the 2011 World Cup — I got a very crude rating of 1812 at the end of it, compared to the official FIFA rating of 1714, a difference, let's call it, of 100 points. This is only applying the hypothetical new weighting to Nigeria and Nigeria alone. It doesn't account for any secondary or tertiary effects from higher (or lower) ratings for other African teams Nigeria may have played, such as Ghana which was at the World Cups during this time. Doing the same for Cameroon — beginning with the 2012 Olympics and ending with the 2015 World Cup — I wound up with a crude rating of 1634 versus the official FIFA rating of 1542 Cheating a bit and using a shortcut, I came up with a crude rating for Cameroon after the 2019 World Cup of 1672, compared with the official FIFA rating of 1552. ** Certainly, changing the weighting (the multiplier) for games African teams play outside their confederation can make a significant difference. Is it enough? I don't know yet. It's too soon to tell. But if it's not enough, it's possible we have to go back to @SiberianThunderT and the observation that the provisional ratings assigned to new teams may be the culprit weighing down African ratings out of proportion to other confederations. Or perhaps we can combine the approaches, recalculating the ratings with the asymmetric multipliers and increase the provisional ratings that were assigned to new African teams over the last 15-20 years. But something can be done and something needs to be done
Just to be as official as back-of-the-envelope calculations can be: SWE (2053) 2-0 AUS (1991**) ; exp 0.59-0.42, act 0.92-0.08 ; pts 60*0.34 = 20 ; SWE (2073), AUS (1871) ESP (2010) 1-0 ENG (2056) ; exp 0.43-0.57, act 0.85-0.15 ; pts 60*0.42 = 25 ; ESP (2035), ENG (2041) SWE (2073) +23 USA (2052) -38* ESP (2035) +33 ENG (2021) -20^ FRA (2015) -12 GER (1988) -74* NED (1970) -10 JPN (1957) +40 BRA (1951) -44 CAN (1945) -51^ AUS (1871) -49 DEN (1862) -4 NOR (1851) -57 CHN (1820) -34 ITA (1798) -49 KOR (1775) -65 Spain rise to #3 while ENG officially hold steady at #4. With how things shook out, my margin of error here probably doesn't matter until you get to JPN/BRA/CAN. USA stay within the top 2, not getting their worst ranking ever, just tying it - but this is, by far, their worst rating ever, as it's been incredibly rare for them to ever be below ~2150; even two years ago, they went above 2200. The fall to ~2050 in just two years is impressive, and IDK if any other nations have seen that kind of rapid decline before. ^Like previous comments about USA and GER, I'm going to dock ENG 10pts from their rating for their tune-up matches, though it doesn't affect their ranking. (Similarly gifting 5pts to CAN, but also doesn't affect their ranking.)
So: what defines an "upset"? In a literal sense, it's when a lower-ranked team beats a higher-ranked team. Often, it's taken to mean a significantly-lower ranked team beats a noticeably higher-ranked team, as a win isn't nearly as impressive if you're lower-ranked by just a few points. Upsets will happen every once in a while. Even the best rating system can't predict exactly when they'll happen, but a great rating system should at least give you a very good idea of how often to expect them in aggregate. So: how have the FIFA women's rankings done this year at predicting the spread of results? Short answer: somewhat badly if you take them at face value, but there's a good core underneath because the bad is largely driven by one single main error: the previously recognized underrating of CAF nations when compared to other confeds (i.e. at least within CAF, they're still fine as well). What I've done is taken the most recently published FIFA rankings+ratings as published (i.e. not "live" ratings updates), applied HFA as required, and then looked at how many rating points ahead the favored team is for each game in the tournament as well as compare the expected result to the actual result. I'll use a 200pt advantage as the cutoff for what counts as a "strongly" favored team; for reference, it's what separates the top teams (ratings 2050+) from those teams that are considered strong but not contenders (think DEN, CHN, ISL, ITA). It also corresponds to an "expected" result of 0.76 - which is *not* the same as saying an expected win percentage of 76%, but it's still a good benchmark value. (For simplicity, I'm considering all draws as an actual result of 0.5 for this analysis). Taking the raw data, we have a total of twelve literal upsets, seven of which are upsets in the more traditional sense where one team is strongly favored entering the match. Plus, we have more draws in matches where the better team is strongly favored than when the better team is weakly favored. This means that, across the four strength-difference bands from 0-100 to 300-500, the average actual result among those games only range from 0.63 to 0.66 with no discernible pattern, and even in the band where the better team is >500 better than their opponent, there's still a loss with the average actual result well below expected. That looks pretty bad.... But remember what I said about the problem being almost entirely from the under-rating of CAF teams? It's not new this year, as we previously saw it with CMR+NGA in 2019 and ZAM in 2021, so I went ahead and applied kolabear's suggested 400pt buff to all CAF teams, and here's how all the numbers shake out after that: It's *so* much better now! We only have seven literal upsets out of 64 matches, with only two of them being what people usually mean with "upset" being against a noticeably favored team. Even the draws now happen more often in evenly matched games than in strongly favored games. Also, the average actual results now scale by band *and* do a much better job of matching the expected result for each band. (Though, to be fair, they're still falling a hair short in actually matching.) If anyone want to see my full analysis/explanation, here's a full PPT I made: https://docs.google.com/presentatio...ouid=116158085008497508202&rtpof=true&sd=true Yes, I really am this much of a numbers nerd. TL;DR The FIFA rankings are still a damn good predictor, so long as you don't try comparing CAF teams to non-CAF teams. (That issue definitely needs to be fixed!) And remember - predicting is better in aggregate than in any individual match!
A lot of fans freaking out and not understanding how Australia could have both finished 4th and dropped in the FIFA Ranking.
In men's rankings you don't lose points in knockout games at the world cup. In women's you do. Australia, even though they finished 4th, played seven games for 3 wins, 1 draw and 3 losses. Japan, who were knocked out in the 1/4 finals and increased their ranking, played 5 games for 4 wins and a loss.
How is Austria above Italy? Iceland at #14. They might be one to watch next WC. They take their soccer seriously from what I understand.
We can now officialy celebrate that, for the first time in the history of the women's rankings, we don't have USA or Germany at the top (nor at the second place either). Somehow funny that the new #1 suffered their only loss at the World Cup by the current #2.
Interesting to see what will happen at the rematch in a couple of weeks (nation league). I'll be there, but after the latest speech by luis Rubiales, I wonder if there will be any Spanish players there...
Points gain among WWC finalists (9th June - 25th August) +104.22 Morocco (58) +94.14 Nigeria (32) +66.80 South Africa (45) +64.28 Zambia (69) +51.86 Jamaica (37) +49.56 Spain (2) +44.67 Japan (8) +41.16 Colombia (22) +40.65 Portugal (19) +27.92 Philippines (44) +19.46 Sweden (1) +11.64 Haiti (52) +4.03 Netherlands (7) -6.78 Denmark (16) -10.44 Switzerland (21) -10.62 England (4) -13.07 Panama (55) -17.33 New Zealand (26) -19.58 Ireland (24) -22.48 France (5) -23.47 Argentina (31) -25.94 Vietnam (34) -34.90 China (15) -36.81 Australia (11) -38.82 USA (3) -45.89 Brazil (9) -50.33 Costa Rica (43) -51.32 Italy (17) -51.50 Canada (10) -51.80 Norway (13) -66.34 Korea Republic (20) -73.89 Germany (6)