FIFA ranks national football teams with the same maths used for chess players
Since August 2018, FIFA's men's rankings have borrowed the Elo system from chess and Go. Every match now nudges a team's rating up or down according to how surprising the result was and how much the game mattered, with a late World Cup match counting twelve times as much as an off-calendar friendly.
FIFA first published its list of men's national teams in December 1992, and it now covers 211 members, up from 167 at the start. Eight nations have reached first place, with Brazil holding it longest, and Spain led as of July 2026. The formula has been overhauled repeatedly, usually after complaints that it misjudged teams' real strength, including major changes in 1999 and 2006.
The original method, devised by two lecturers at Zurich University, awarded three points for a win and one for a draw over eight years of results, with bonuses for beating stronger opponents, for goals, and even 0.3 extra points simply for playing away. Later versions, like tennis rankings, let points accumulate and then expire. The 2018 system instead keeps a continuous rating: a team gains or loses points after each game based on the gap between the actual and expected result, multiplied by an importance weight. A penalty shoot-out defeat counts as half a result, and teams lose nothing for knockout-stage defeats at major tournaments.
The switch had drama. FIFA planned to launch straight after the 2018 World Cup, but some journalists suspected the delay to August arose because early projections still left Germany first despite its group-stage exit. The final version seeded every team on a scale from 1,600 points for Germany down to 868 for the lowest, then replayed recent results, dropping Germany to 15th and lifting world champions France to the top.
A 2022 analysis judged it clearly better than earlier methods, though not perfect. Unlike pure Elo, where total points stay fixed, FIFA's version slowly inflates: across 3,444 games between June 2018 and March 2022, the pool of 254,680 points grew by 2,099, about 0.8 percent. Its predictions would also improve if it accounted for home advantage.
Source: FIFA Men's World Ranking
