FIFA Women's World Rankings

The FIFA Women's World Rankings for football were introduced in July 2003 as a follow-on to the existing FIFA World Rankings for men. FIFA Women's World Rankings attempt to compare the strength of internationally active teams at any given time and ranks FIFA Women's World Cup qualifying teams.

Differences with men's system

There are several important distinctions in the FIFA Women's World Rankings formula:
*FIFA Women's World Rankings are only published four times a year. Normally, rankings come out in March, June, September and December. However, the dates may be adjusted in World Cup years; for example, in 2007, the third set of rankings came out in October, allowing the rankings to reflect the results of the World Cup held in September. In contrast, FIFA Men's World Rankings are published monthly.
*FIFA Women's World Rankings are based on every international match a team ever played, going back to 1971, the first FIFA-recognized women's international between France and the Netherlands. The men's ranking system considers only matches in the last four years.
*FIFA Women's World Rankings is not weighted to emphasize recent results, whereas the men's results are weighted on a sliding scale, thus emphasizing recent results.

This results in a FIFA Women's World Rankings system which is far more similar to the Elo football rating system; ratings for teams with fewer than 30 matches should be considered provisional.

Leaders

To date Germany and the USA have been the only two teams to have led the rankings; together they have held the top two spots since the third set of rankings came out in October 2003, immediately after the 2003 FIFA Women's World Cup.

ee also

*Women's association football around the world
*FIFA Women's World Cup
*Algarve Cup
*FIFA Men's World Rankings
*Elo football rating

References

External links

* [http://www.fifa.com/worldfootball/ranking/lastranking/gender=f/fullranking.html Current rankings and statistics for all countries - FIFA.com]
* [http://www.internationalmark.co.uk/women.html Mark's Women's World Football Ranking]
* [http://www.roonba.co.nr/rankingswor.htm The Roon Ba World Football Ranking (Men & Women)]
* [http://www.womensworldfootball.com Women's World Football]
* [http://www.fifa.com/worldfootball/ranking/procedure/women.html Rating procedure - FIFA.com]