Soccer Power Index

[Baines]

aka Nate Silver probably already knows how many goals we're going to score

Stats wizard Nate Silver has turned his eye to football. Silver previously found fame with his PECOTA/Baseball Prospectus system for forecasting player performance and team performance in the play-offs and his predictions for the 2008 US Presidential election for which, bar one state and 0.1% of the vote, he was spot on.

He's now developed a methodology for ranking international teams taking into account the performances of their players in international and domestic games.

Links here:

Rankings
Methodology
FAQs

Top Ten - a little high for England and Uruguay, but presumably it's better than the shit FIFA normally come up with
Brazil
Spain
England
Netherlands
Argentina
Germany
Portugal
Chile
France
Uruguay

[papereyes]

The current FIFA top 10 is ...

Brazil
Spain
Netherlands
Italy
Germany
Argentina
England
Croatia
France
Portugal

Uruguay are 25th, Chile are 17th

So other than Croatia, who have essentially imploded over the last 2 years, and the under-rating of Uruguay and Chile, how different is it?

My main issue with the FIFA ones is that they assign an all but arbitary value to the strength of Africa and Asia so teams from CAF and AFC are over-rated compared with average European teams. I would also imagine that it is slow to register changes in form unless over an extended period of time - its a weighted, rolling average of the best results over a few years.

EDIT

"Relative to the FIFA Rankings, the SPI tends to rate more highly the World Cup, European Championship, Confederations Cup and most World Cup qualifying (especially on continents like Europe and South America, where it is difficult to qualify; less so for continents like North America, where the qualifying process is more forgiving). Other competitions -- particularly minor continental championships like the Gold Cup -- are weighted lower than in FIFA, as are friendlies."