How ratings work

Elo, match by match. Every team has one rating. All 522,291 known matches are played through in date order: a win raises the rating, a loss lowers it, a draw moves it towards the opponent's, and a team that does not play keeps its rating.

How much a match moves it. Change = 24 × (result − expected result) × goal weight. Expected result = 1 / (1 + 10^{(Rb − Ra)/400}); a win counts 1, a draw ½, a loss 0. Bigger wins weigh more (a 2-goal win 1.5 times, a 5-goal win 2 times). Beating a much weaker team brings little, losing to it costs a lot.

New teams. A team starts from its club tier or its country's average; its first matches move it up to 5 times more, so it finds its level quickly (after 10 matches about 1.4 times, after 30 about 1.1 times).

Team = academy + birth year + squad. Born-2015 and born-2016 teams of a club are different teams; a club's second team (B) is rated separately from its first team.

🌍 Mostly domestic games. A team with fewer than 5 matches against teams from other countries is rated mostly against its own country's teams: the rating shows its level at home, not necessarily in Europe. Its rating stays as it is, but in the match chances it counts up to 40 points lower against a foreign team - in their first international matches such teams did that much worse than their ratings said.

Match chances. Win / draw / loss chances come from the two ratings: a rating gap counts a little less than the formula above (1.15 times wider), and a draw is 22 % of an even match. Checked on 22 000 later matches the formula had not seen.

Levels. Elite 1950+, Very strong 1800+, Strong 1650+, Medium 1500+, Developing below 1500.

Data. Results from 30,541 tournaments collected from tournament platforms and from tournaments hosted on RankedCup.

Girls' teams. We do not show ratings of girls' teams: there are still too few girls' results for a fair rating. We keep collecting them. An organizer who creates a tournament on RankedCup chooses whether it is for boys or girls, and its ratings follow that choice. Girls' ratings may come once there is enough data.