Ratings vs. Rankings
This website provides comprehensive power ratings for football (soccer) clubs and countries that allows a quick, accurate, and useful measurement of relative team strength. The difference between two teams' ratings is the predicted score differential of a neutral site matchup.
Football has a number of ranking sites (
FIFA and
ELO the foremost) yet few ratings systems (such as the
Sagarin ratings) across domestic leagues or at the international level. Crankshaw Sports Stats is designed to do just that.
Ordinal ranking systems are designed to determine whether one team is better than another. The drawback to ranking is that there is no way to know
how much better they are. A ranking system allows one to determine where in a distribution a team falls, a rating system allows one to determine what the distribution is.
The Ratings
The Crankshaw Sports Stats rating system allows the user to determine not only if a team is better than another but, in addition,
precisely how much the team is better than another. Like the Sagarin rating "predictor", the difference in two teams' rating scores is meant to predict the margin of victory for the stronger team at a neutral venue. The ratings fully accounts for variations in strength of schedule. From the ratings it is possible to construct
statistical models that will produce final score predictions along with error confidence intervals for the prediction.
Domestic and International Competition
There are two sets of ratings on this site: domestic club leagues and internatinal teams. The Domestic Club ratings allows the user to directly compare any two clubs in the world. The top divisions for all countries in the world are rated as well as many lower divisions. The ratings are based on domestic league performance, international club tournaments, and the comparison between the domestic performance and international performance at the country level. The Intertnational ratings allows the user to compare any two countries in the world. These are based on all FIFA official matches dating back to 1872.

E-mail:
crankshaw_m@bls.gov