How national team rankings are calculated: frating.today, FIFA and World Football Elo Ratings

There is no legally «one true» way to compare national teams — only competing methods, each with its own philosophy. Broadly, they fall into two camps:

tournament («prize») systems — award points for the place a team finished at a given tournament (a World Cup, a continental championship) and add them up over a period;
Elo rating systems — give a team a «strength» number that changes after every single match, based on the result and the opponent's strength, independent of any tournament.

frating.today belongs to the first type; the official FIFA ranking since 2018 and the independent World Football Elo Ratings project belong to the second. Below is how each one works and what the difference looks like in practice.

1. How frating.today calculates it

This is an unofficial ranking, entirely unaffiliated with FIFA, built not on individual matches but on a team's final place at a finals tournament (the World Cup, the Euros, Copa América and other tournaments are treated as parallel rankings that never mix).

Final tournament places. Teams at one tournament are ordered by the stage they reached, then, for ties, by matches played, points, goal difference, goals scored and wins. 1st place is worth 5 000 points. Each following place loses 20 points compared to the previous one — except before places 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 17, where the step is raised to 50 points (these are the borders between the final, semi-finals, quarter-finals and the next stages on a classic bracket). The full points-by-place table is on the methodology page.

The TODAY rating. Adds up points from the last 4 tournaments with linear decay: the newest counts 100%, the next one 75%, another 50%, and the oldest of the four 25%. Teams that did not play any of these tournaments are not listed. The rating updates once per tournament cycle (usually every 4 years per tournament type), not monthly.

TOP ALL-TIME. A plain sum of points across all tournaments, with no decay.

In other words, the frating.today method answers «who went how far at the tournaments that mattered, and when», not «who plays better on average» — friendlies, qualifying cycles and individual match results never enter it at all.

2. The official FIFA ranking

The FIFA ranking has completely changed its underlying logic more than once, and that matters: what is called «the FIFA ranking» today works on fundamentally different principles than it did 10–15 years ago.

1999–2006. The first version of the system: points were awarded for wins/draws, adjusted for the opponent's strength and the match's status, but the system drew criticism — notably, for letting a weaker team gain points even after losing to a clearly stronger one.

2006–2018. A more transparent model: 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss (a penalty-shootout win counted as 2), the result multiplied by a coefficient for the opponent's strength, a confederation coefficient (0.85–1.0) and a match-status coefficient (from 1.0 for a friendly to 4.0 for the World Cup finals). Matches counted over 4 years: the last 12 months at weight 1.0, 12–24 months at 0.5, 24–36 months at 0.3, 36–48 months at 0.2. Home advantage and goal difference were not accounted for at all — which also drew criticism, as too crude.

From August 2018 to the present. FIFA switched to a system that is, in essence, a variant of the Elo rating:

P_after = P_before + I × W × (W_actual − W_expected)

where I is the match-importance coefficient, W is the numeric result (win = 1, draw = 0.5, loss = 0; a penalty-shootout win = 0.75, a penalty-shootout loss = 0.5 — so both teams get a «half» point for a shootout), and W_expected is the expected result, computed from the difference between the two teams' ratings (a logistic curve with a 400-point step, as in classic Elo). The importance coefficient I varies widely — from 5 for a friendly outside a FIFA window and 10 inside one, 15 for a Nations League group match, 25 for World Cup qualifiers, 35–40 for continental tournaments (more at the knockout stage), and up to 50–60 for the World Cup itself (more from the quarter-finals on). The rating updates after every international match «window» — so several times a year, not once per tournament cycle.

The key difference from frating.today: FIFA counts every official match, including friendlies and qualifiers, not just the final place at a decisive tournament, and it never «resets» history — a team's rating carries on continuously through decades and hundreds of games.

3. World Football Elo Ratings

An independent project (eloratings.net), one of the oldest and most cited alternative rankings, computes a team's strength with the classic Elo formula going back to 1872 — the first official international match in history:

P = K × G × (W − W_expected)

K is the tournament weight: 60 for the World Cup and, in the 1908–1980 historical period, the Olympics; 50 for continental and intercontinental tournaments; 40 for World Cup qualifiers and major tournaments; 30 for other tournaments; 20 for friendlies. G is a goal-difference adjustment: 1 for a draw or a one-goal win, 1.5 for a two-goal win, and beyond that 1.75 + 0.125×(N−2) for a difference of three goals or more (so the bigger the score, the more points shift from the loser to the winner, but with diminishing returns). Home advantage is accounted for as a 100-point bonus to the home team's rating, specifically when computing the expected result W_expected (the same 400-point logistic curve used in the current FIFA rating). According to its authors, the rating more or less converges to a team's true strength after about 30 matches played — younger teams with fewer games have a provisional rating.

What sets this rating apart from FIFA's is above all its historical depth (matches since 1872, versus the old pre-2018 FIFA system's 4-year window) and the fact that it is a fully independent project with no official status — but with a fully open methodology that has not changed since launch, which makes it a convenient reference point for researchers.

Comparison table

	frating.today	FIFA (since 2018)	World Football Elo Ratings
Unit of record	final tournament place	every official match	every match since 1872
Not counted	friendlies, qualifiers	—	—
Model	fixed points scale by place	Elo (weights by match type)	Elo (weights + goal-difference adjustment)
Home advantage	not counted	not counted	+100 points to the home team when computing the expected result
Goal difference in a match	no effect (only on group/bracket placement)	no effect on the result value (0/0.5/1)	directly increases the point transfer (G-factor)
Historical depth	since 1930 (World Cup) and later for other tournaments	does not publish pre-1992 history in its original form	since 1872
Update frequency	once per tournament cycle	several times a year	after every match played
Official status	no, an amateur project	yes, used for draw seeding	no, an independent project

Strengths and weaknesses of each approach

A tournament system like frating.today wins on clarity and resistance to noise: the result of a random friendly or a rout against a clearly weaker opponent never «inflates» the rating — only what a team actually showed on the biggest stages counts. The flip side is that such a rating «sleeps» between tournaments: a team that had an outstanding qualifying campaign or a run of friendly wins won't see it in the table until the next tournament, and a team that failed to qualify drops out of the TODAY table entirely.

Elo systems (FIFA and World Football Elo Ratings) react to every match and are therefore far more «alive» and sensitive to current form — but for the same reason they depend more heavily on the calendar: a team that played more matches against strong opponents, all else equal, has more chances to both gain and lose points than a team of the same level with a sparser schedule. The difference between FIFA-2018+ and World Football Elo Ratings is subtler than the difference between either of them and frating.today: both use the logistic Elo formula with a 400-point step and similar match-importance weighting logic, but FIFA ignores goal difference (a narrow win and a rout both give a team the same result value of 1), while the independent Elo rating explicitly rewards a rout through its G-factor — a deliberate FIFA design choice against rewarding «piling on» an already-beaten opponent.

Where frating.today fits in

Philosophically, frating.today is closest to the earliest, «prize»-based idea of a ranking — the way national teams' success was historically judged before the Elo era: by medals and tournament places, not by a rating point after every friendly. Its key difference even from the old (2006–2018) FIFA system — which also used points-for-result with coefficients rather than Elo — is that the old FIFA system still counted every match, not just a team's final place at a tournament. frating.today's niche is answering the specific question of «how did this team do at the World Cup/Euros/Copa América», free of noise from qualifiers and friendlies, but with a transparent, unchanging points scale that anyone can check by hand against the table of places. More on how the points are calculated is on the methodology page.