For quite a while now, I’ve been getting questions and comments about the WCR Weekly Top 25. Some weeks, I try to go into a little detail regarding the purpose and reasoning of the rankings, but it becomes cumbersome to try to give explanations and principles on a weekly basis. For this reason, I thought it would be a good idea to give some information regarding the background behind the Weekly Rankings, as well as the criteria.
The weekly rankings came about by accident. Originally, I was applying formulas to determine Annual Rankings of world football clubs. I have completed those from 1960 through the present, many of which can be found by clicking on the Annual Rankings tag. Upon completion of this project, I decided to apply the formulas to the season in progress to see what the results would be. I found the results interesting and decided to start this blog in order to share them with others who might also be interested.
The WCR Top 25 is intended to be a reflective measure, not a predictive measure. That is to say, if (just in way of an example), the rankings have AS Roma at number seven and FC Barcelona at number sixteen, the purpose of the rankings is not to tell you that AS Roma would defeat FC Barcelona in a heads-up match. Rather, the purpose is to reflect the fact that from the beginning of the current season to the time that the rankings are published, AS Roma has performed better. What happens in the future will be reflected in future rankings, not in the current ranking.
The rankings are determined, primarily, applying two factors. The first is domestic league coefficients, which are based by club performance over the prior five seasons in the continental championship tournaments – UEFA Champions League, Copa Libertadores, and the Champions Leagues from North America, Africa and Asia. The second factor is each club’s performance in its own domestic league, taking into consideration place in the table and goal differential. (Also, late in the continental championship season, bonus points are given for performance in the continental championship tournaments.)
The most important factor in the formulas is domestic league performance. I believe this is the best way to compare clubs within a league because, in most leagues, each club plays every other club, once at home and once away, and this standard, consistent schedule eliminates biases created by strength of schedule and home field advantage. This is very helpful in creating annual rankings. It is less effective in weekly rankings because the fewer matches a club has played, the more important a club’s schedule is in its ranking. Of course, there are ways of altering the formulas to take strength of schedule into account on a weekly basis, but I know no way of doing it quickly and easily and, frankly, I do not have the time for such an endeavor. Thus, the weekly rankings will penalize clubs that play a tough early-season schedule, but that penalty will become less and less every successive week since all of the clubs in a given league have identical schedules by season’s end.
Since the rankings use the data from the current season for each league, they are pretty meaningless until some point in the season in which each club in a given league has played enough matches to provide meaningful data. When does that time occur? I’m not sure. To minimize this problem, however, I have decided to add data from the prior season to the current season’s data until such time as each club in a given league has played five matches. This seems proper to me, but reasonable minds can differ.
I receive a lot of hits from people looking for “official club rankings” or “FIFA club rankings.” I apologize it you search for these and are disappointed by what you find here, but FIFA does not officially rank clubs, which is one of the reasons that I decided to publish my rankings. They are not, and do not presume to be, official. It’s just a set of rankings that are determined in the manner in which I choose. Again, reasonable minds can differ and if you have a ranking of your own, I would be interested in seeing it, but it’s likely that no two would be the same.
I know of only one other site, Soccer Source, that produces a weekly Top 25 list. Ideally, I would love to see another three or four or more sites that attempt to do the same thing, which would allow us to aggregate the Weekly Top 25s in a similar manner as the AP or ESPN ranks college football or basketball clubs. Additional opinions and additional perspectives could do nothing but improve the accuracy and legitimacy of the rankings. Until then, I’ll just concentrate on publishing my own Top 25.
Finally, I’ve been accused of being a Liverpool fan, a Chelsea fan, a Liverpool hater, a Chelsea hater, Portuguese, Dutch and mentally challenged. I assure you that I am none of the preceding. I let the numbers pick the Top 25 each week. For the sake of full disclosure, if I would be biased against any clubs, they would presumably be my favorites, which include: DC United, Newcastle United, Boca Juniors, Werder Bremen, Inter Milan and Atletico de Madrid. I don’t think I’ve shown any bias in the rankings towards any of those clubs, but if you believe I have shown bias, you should probably limit your suggestions of such to those clubs.
If you’ve read this far, I’m impressed, and I appreciate your interest in these rankings. I’m always open to comments, questions and suggestions. I will supplement this from time to time as warranted.
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