How does FC 24 rank national teams?

It’s a bit complicated.

The ranking system is used as the basis of seedings for tournaments, so it’s not just a novelty; it really does matter. For that reason, it’s not without its critics as a bad run of seedings can see teams struggle to qualify for major tournaments, which leaves them perpetually struggling to bump up their FIFA ranking.

The challenge is, you have to rank teams that don’t necessarily play each other very often. You can’t just use something arbitrary like “number of wins” either; when Australia was in the Oceania confederation, they won pretty much every game. They would have been miles ahead at the top of the FIFA rankings, but that would be a distortion vs. European teams who play in a much more competitive Federation. This would also encourage big teams to organise friendlies against minnows in order to bolster up their FIFA ranking.

So, the ranking system (based on a concept called Elo) awards points based on:

• The importance (i) of the game teams play in. Importance is ranked from 5 for exhibition games up to 60 for the final rounds of the World Cup. Qualification games for major tournaments are given 25 points.
• The result (r). A win is 1, a win on penalties is 0.75, a draw or a defeat on penalties is 0.5, a defeat is 0.
• The relative strength of the teams playing determined by subtracting the team’s pre-game points (cp) with the opposition’s pre-game points to get a difference in ranking (dr). So, basically, if you beat a team 100 places below you, you get a negligible bonus, but if you beat a team 100 places above you, you get a bonanza.

So in the recent Euro final, Italy (1642) beat England (1687) on penalties.

Italy’s new points total = 1642 + 40 * (0.75 – (1 / (10 ^(-(1642 – 1687)/600)+1)))

Italy would have gained 11.7 points for the narrow penalty shootout win over comparable opposition with the points bumped up due to the importance of the occasion. England would have only stood to lose a few points, but points losses in the knockout stages of major tournaments aren’t counted anyway.

Meanwhile, Finland (1411) beat Denmark (1632) in the same tournament (albeit under controversial circumstances).

Finland’s new points total = 1411 + 35 * ((1 – 1(/(10 ^ (1411–1632)/600)+1)))

Finland would have gained 24.5 points for this victory against a much more fancied opponent.

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Note: the points totals here are just illustrative. The actual pre-game points for Italy and England would include the points accumulated in the games in the run-up to the final, but I can’t be bothered to work these out.

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