KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum Football World Rankings?!?!

Does anyone know exactly how the rankings are calculated, and is it a fair way to do it? The reason I ask is that currently, England are the 6th best team in the world. Obviously, even to hardened/blinkered England fans this is far from being realistic. We are apparently better than Portugal, Italy, France & Argentina. If we are going to have these rankings, especially as they influence tournament seedings(?) then they should at least have some accuracy, shouldn't they?

(Personally, around 15th would be a fair ranking for us...)



http://www.fifa.com/worldfootball/ranking/lastranking/gender=m/fullranking.html

Update: if you click on "procedure & schedule" it lists criteria for gaining ranking points but it still doesn't explain how the total is achieved.

Im not quite sure how England are 6th, I would say we deserve to be around 12th/13th, but what i find crazy is how the republic of ireland are only 33rd when we where only a handball away from going to the world cup, how can they be 21 places behind Norway who didnt even qualify for the world cup qualification matches

What I know is that even qualifying matches are taken into perspective when deciding to give points as well as major tournaments such as the world cup. Spain are no. 1 simply because they are the world and european champions while having an almost perfect qualifying campaign. Netherlands are second as they made it to the final of the worldcup while Germany were third in the worldcup. This changes occasionally and Uruguay made a jump from about 13th if I remember correctly to going 5th after winning the copa america. England are 6th best because of their qualifying campaign. They are normally with weak teams such as Andorra and Switzerland thus giving them a great advantage to have good qualifying campaigns. They only reached the round of 16 in the worldcup but if you look at the other teams under them, they have not been as successful in recent times.