I'm glad USA-CRC was a friendly and not a competitive match because it'll "only" be a loss of ~7pts... I've never before seen such a dominant performance end in a nil-nil draw.
Certainly the most dominant performance from the USWNT without a win in at least a decade: 2015 - The #USWNT had 26 shots, 12 shots on target and 67 touches in the box against Costa Rica, all the most in any match in which they failed to score since Opta began detailed data collection on all USWNT matches in 2015. Denied. pic.twitter.com/Yko3KDMkiQ— OptaJack⚽️ (@OptaJack) July 17, 2024
Reminder heading into the Olympics — I would add 250 to 300 points to the African representatives to try to get a more realistic idea of what to expect during the tournament. Adding 300 points to the last published rating for Zambia gives them an provisional rating of 1697, which puts them just ahead of New Zealand's 1680. Adding 300 to Nigeria's rating gives them a provisional rating of 1916 putting them just slightly ahead of Australia's 1890. It's also not far behind Japan's 1976 and Brazil's 1959. If that provisional rating is realistic, it makes Group C really strong and unpredictable. *** The estimated homefield advantage of 100 puts France effectively at the top of the list by a small margin , 2130 points to Spain's 2100
Back of the envelope: Each match worth up to 60pts 1-goal wins worth ~0.85 of the result; 3-goal wins worth ~0.96 USA favored in every match except the first match against GER Let's assume that the ZAM and AUS matches were roughly break-even versus "expected", so ~0pts gained (or lost) First match against GER: 60*(~0.96 - ~0.45) = ~30pts gained Other three matches, estimate 60*(0.85-0.65) = ~12pts gained each My guess would be a gain of ~66pts on just the Olympic matches themselves Not quite enough to break 2100, but it's possible USA retakes #1 since I bet Spain's 3 expected wins are outweighed by the draw and loss to much-lower-ranked sides. BIG asterisk on that, though, since I'm not considering any team's warm-up matches right now.
Just checked the Cambio De Juego Twitter account, and they've confirmed (yesterday) that USA would've been #1 in the next ranking regardless of the result of the Gold medal match. Was a gain of 46pts (some points from AUS but losses in the warm-up matches) before today, so maybe around 56pts total instead of the 66pts I estimated. 🇩🇪 Germany win the bronze medal at the Olympics after beating 🇪🇸 Spain, who in turn, fall to 3rd in the FIFA Ranking.This hands the lead to the 🇺🇸 United States. Even if the USWNT lose tomorrow, they'll keep the first place. pic.twitter.com/pQkkBtSbY8— Cambio de Juego (@_cambiodejuego) August 10, 2024 USA, CAN, and BRA with huge gains. ESP, FRA, and AUS the big losers of this OG tournament...
My main question for this thread is: Why does it matter what some useless poll/rating system says about any team? The "ratings" are simple a way for uninvolved people to rank things (which people seem to REALLY like to do) and make thinking lazier. The ratings are, unfortunately, used for things like seedings but even that does not matter much. (To win a tournament you must beat the second best team or beat whoever beats them and it does not matter what their ranking are. If they had any real meaning then they would be used by teams to judge their strength but they give a view of the position of a team that keeps moving up/down/sideways and loses all meaning in the real world very fast. Matches that are way too old are counted too much and team rankings matter not on the current strength but on strength exhibited in the past with largely different teams in most cases. The bottom line is that international ratings are of roughly the same value as the teats on a boar hog.
My experience comparing how well rating systems do at predicting future outcomes in relation to how well humans do is that the ratings do better than most humans. There will, however, be some humans that do better. I attribute this two one of two factors: (1) luck or (2) true expertise combined with detailed knowledge. When it comes to exact accuracy at predicting outcomes, on the other hand, what good ratings systems do is tell you likelihoods, not exact outcomes. This is the case with the system FIFA uses. So, when two teams play, a good rating system can tell you Team A has an X% win likelihood, a Y% tie likelihood, and a Z% loss likelihood. These likelihoods are quite reliable, as they are based on very large data bases. This is why bookmakers use both rating systems and detailed current information. My experience also is that a good number of people do not like rating systems. They prefer their own judgments and think they are objective.
Friday, I believe You'll understand (won't you?) if I don't try to give a comprehensive answer to a topic some of us have discussed for years, but — The FIFA ratings for women is a variation of the Elo-Ratings for chess, a system which has proven popular over decades and which many other games besides chess have adapted An Elo or chess rating system is objective, it's not based on people's subjective opinions on this or that team but is calculated, objectively, based on team's results, primarily win / lose / draw — although the FIFA system also uses game scores, ie how many goals a team wins by, an adaptation which seems to work for very low-scoring games like soccer. It is not merely a ranking system but a rating system. That is the ratings have meaning, not just the rankings. Two teams can be ranked one after the other but have ratings differences which are far apart meaning one team is significantly superior to the other. Conversely, two teams can have ratings so close to each other that the fact one is ranked above another is statistically meaningless The system is probability-based. For example, one team rated 100 points higher than another has an expected win pct. of about (.640) or 64% over the other team. A team rated 200 points higher has an expected win pct of about (.760) or 76%. Of course it's not exact — it's sports and upsets happen. The lower-rated team is expected to upset a higher-rated team, but naturally not as often when it is 200 or 300 or 400 etc points lower than if it was only 50 or 100 points lower I'll talk a bit more about how the rating system can be useful in another post.
There's a lot wrong with your post but I'll focus on this one thing for now, as the two posters above me have already covered a lot of ground. This quoted claim is just outright false. The nature of an Elo-based system is that the older a data point is, the less it matters. The rankings are designed so that you only need 20-30 matches for the rating of each team to be considered roughly accurate, and for top teams that means you can essentially ignore matches older than 2-3 years. Sure, rosters can change a bit faster than that, but short of an entire team's worth of players retiring (or boycotting) all at once, the core of the team doesn't change that quickly. Continuity matters. So no, you don't understand the ratings and are just coming off either as upset at what they currently look like and/or just generally distrustful on anything quantitative. It's true that no model is perfect. But they can still tell you a damn lot of reliable information when they're built well.
All good points have been made above. I just want to add , I am interested in my beloved USWNT to get back to the top rank so the idiotic mass would just shut up and stop attacking them.
Any match that gets considered in the rankings that are more than a year old are meaningless. The football ranking systems are pretty much the same as political polls. That is the almost never give even a close approximation to reality. They exist to make jobs for number crunchers and give the masses something to talk about but most of those that use them really delude themselves into thinking they have meaning. They all use statistics and that, in itself, removes most meaning:: "Most people use statistics like a drunkard uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination." - Mark Twain While I respect the posts above I strongly disagree about rankings having any real value. I probably should not have posted to this thread but, sometimes, my desire to make a point wipes out my good sense. Sorry.
That's.... no. Teams flipping strength on a dime is incredibly rare. If a player manages to become a consistent starter on their NT, that's going to be at the very least several years on the team (assuming no injuries) and that will be a through point for the team overall; consider that you often have large cores of players sticking around, and the results of last year will be highly correlated with results this year - when you look at all teams over all years. Again, there will always be individual exceptions here and there, but those don't invalidate the system overall. Think "the exception that proves the rule". Then you really should have read more of the thread before commenting. Every year, the people here will do post-mortems on major tournaments and consistently show that the pre-tournament ratings were highly predictive taken overall. Again, there will always be an upset or two, (and usually a systematic bias for the CAF teams that we take into account in our analyses,) and yes that means that the "favorite" doesn't always win (in fact they rarely do, because that's how tournaments work), but over however many dozens of games there are in each tournament, most go the way you would expect based on the ratings coming in.
In one sense they have no value at all because we do not award trophies or prizes based on them. We also (at least to my limited knowledge) do not use them as a means to decide who plays in a tournament. We use them as talking points but their main use is as a seeding tool when doing draws for qualification to tournaments and for the tournaments themselves. Even before rankings use was widespread as a seeding tool we often used a more simpler system for seeding teams, often based on recent results or from the last tournament. I think the current systems that FIFA use tend to be more accurate than some of the past ones which could be manipulated more easily. Your post stimulated some discussion which contained some good information for someone not hugely knowledgeable about how they work so I'm glad you posted. With some factual information people can form a more considered on the value of rankings.
To add to the discussion about rankings, here is some information from my experience with US NCAA Division I women's soccer, for which the NCAA has a rating system and for which there are two other rating systems, one by Kenneth Massey and the other a variation I created of the NCAA system. Each year, I assign pre-season ratings to teams. I do this strictly based on their past ratings (and resulting ranks) under my rating system variation. I do this for two reasons: (1) to use when providing tools coaches with NCAA Tournament aspirations can use when scheduling non-conference opponents in future years and (2) to use in projecting where teams will end up in the upcoming season, which is largely a fun exercise that becomes more useful to coaches as the season progresses during which I substitute actual game results for predicted game results. One of the things I do, out of curiosity and as a test for the usefulness of predicting strength using only past ratings, is use the ratings and team schedules to predict where teams will end up in their in-conference rankings at the end of the season. There are two others who do predicted in-conference rankings: (1) the coaches in the conference, who have a lot of awareness of the strengths of their conference opponents, who has graduated, who is new to the team, and lots of other details, and (2) a university faculty member who does in-conference rankings based on a number of metrics such as players who have graduated, who is new, coach past success, lost goal scoring due to graduation, and so on. At the end of the season, I compare how close I, the coaches, and the faculty member came, in their in-conference rankings, to what the actual rankings ended up being. My expectation when I started doing this was that the coaches and faculty member would do much better than my purely history-based ratings/ranks. As an additional piece of info, I have found that the average of the last 7 years' rankings under my rating system produces the best match with where teams will end up next year. With that as the setting, using the 2023 season as an example, which involved 347 teams that were in conferences, divided among 31 conferences, with the numbers of teams in the conferences ranging from 8 to 15, here is how close the three of us came to our pre-season rankings matching the actual end-of-season rankings: Coaches: On average, their predicted rankings were within 2.09 positions of the actual rankings Faculty member: Within 2.28 positions Me: Within 2.15 positions In 2022, the numbers were 2.44, 2.44, and 2.61 respectively. And in 2021, they were 2.0, 2.13, and 2.40 respectively. I take two lessons from this. First, it is impossible to predict precisely where teams will end up at the end of the season. Second, using only past history provides for less accurate predictions than using detailed current knowledge and expertise, but only slightly less accurate. In other words, from the second lesson, teams in fact tend to be fairly consistent over the years, to the extent that humans with expertise and detailed knowledge of teams can make only marginally better predictions of where teams will end up than one can get looking simply at past performance. Although I had suspected after watching teams' ranks as they evolved over the years that past performance would be a pretty good indicator of upcoming performance, I still am surprised how well past performance does as compared to what humans with expertise and a great deal of current information (and a lot at stake so far as the coaches are concerned) can do. Some might find this irritating or depressing, to think that humans cannot improve a lot on the statistics of past history. For me, it simply is interesting.
Liechtenstein is newly added to the rankings , which is now at a new high for the amount of teams listed.
An ESPN article on Liechtenstein joining the rankings with friendlies against Namibia: Last month, I went off to Liechtenstein to watch one of the matches that would finally help them achieve a maiden FIFA ranking. This is the story of one of Europe’s smallest countries and their steps on the international stage https://t.co/hjO7HfAIgx— Sophie Lawson (@lawson_sv) August 16, 2024
Meanwhile England and Sweden are 4D-chessing it: if you're not in the Olympics, you can't lose points in the Olympics. /s