Talk:World Football Elo Ratings

All time team highs and lows
I've merged the "All-time highest ratings" and "All-time highest ranking" again, as proposed, supported and executed last summer before the great meltdown. Those tables contained much duplicated material. The new table has more information as well (top 60 -> top 80, all time lows are included). This should be uncontroversial. Two improvements currently come to my mind:
 * As requested by IP 46.242.13.150 in October 2018, we could separate the historical highs and lows of broken up countries and their official successors (Soviet Union - Russia, Yugoslavia - Serbia, and Czechoslovakia - Czechia). In principal, I've done that already for Ireland (the high rank and low ratings of combined Ireland are mentioned in a footnote. We could perhaps skip a ranking number for the ones lower on the list (that would be Russia, Serbia and Czechia). A drawback is that the website does not provide the data directly.
 * It would be nice to have a sortable table, so that you can see for example which team recently reached a high or low (Belgium and North Korea, right now), or which team has the highest low (this unfortunately has a boring answer). This likely can only be done when the table is in one "column", which takes up too much space in my opinion. Perhaps someone knows how to (magically) make a broken-up table sortable.

I'll stepwise introduce the other improvements I had proposed in June 2018 (how do you link to headers in archived discussion pages?); a lot of these were based on suggestions by other editors. i've resurrected the draft again in my sandbox. Back then, over a two week period, only one editor chimed in (thanks !). Afasmit (talk) 23:02, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Too bad this was removed, it was very informative, and can't be found elsewhere. SimTheWorld (talk) 14:31, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Request unprotection or reversion to version with consensus
There is a WP:CONSENSUS at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football (and previously here) that only the first 25 teams should be listed, as per WP:INDISCRIMINATE. The only objector is one IP user, who doesn't give any policy-based arguments. This article should therefore be restored to the version with consensus, rather than the IP's edit warred version. And semi-protection would suffice. the purpose of full protection is to resolve a dispute, but we have a consensus amongst most editors- it's just that the IP is WP:NOTLISTENING. Keeping this article fully protected on a version against a discussed consensus is unnecessary and will only encourage this IP user to continue edit warring in future. Joseph2302 (talk) 09:26, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * No, there is no consensus. It was all discussed in the wrong talk page and involved editors in this article were not notified. Dentren &#124; Talk 06:12, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * WT:FOOTY is an appropriate centralised place to get a consensus. Because it has way more watchers than this page. Joseph2302 (talk) 07:54, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The main editor of this article (the 84. IP) was certainly notified, multiple times, even directly on their talk page (User_talk:84.124.224.222 - who also happens very likely to be Special:Contributions/Txikon). That they have not bothered to answer is typical of their behaviour, but that does not mean the consensus is invalid. Even if for a moment we agreed that the discussion was not at the right place (and let me be clear, my opinion is that it was), WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY would apply - and that would still be ignoring that the contributors were certainly notified of the FOOTY discussion since it was linked in edit summaries, the article was protected, et al. Now, do you have a policy based argument for why we should re-instate the tables or are you going to continue crying foul over purely bureaucratic concerns? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 12:00, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Now, to alleviate any further silliness about bureaucracy, I've started an RfC at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Football RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 12:11, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Initial Values
Checking the initial values of different national teams on https://www.eloratings.net/, which is used as the reference in the article, I have noticed that they are different. For example France started at 1600 on May 1, 1904, while Spain started at 2000 on August 28, 1920. Is there an explanation for this? Thank you. --2001:A61:A11:1701:F4CB:BCB8:6F8B:3CE4 (talk) 13:58, 21 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Interesting. I cannot find a reasonable explanations; Elo ratings should generally have all equal starting values, typically 1500. They seem to have been decided by the creator of the rating, which would actually be not very good 14 novembre (talk) 20:50, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

When is a draw not a draw?
The short paragraph Result of match includes:
 * W is the result of the game (1 for a win, 0.5 for a draw, and 0 for a loss). This also holds when a game is won or lost on extra time.

in other words, draws in knockout matches are only counted as draws if the extra time ends in a draw. I find this unrealistic when considering its effect on ranking and rating teams, but this is not the place to argue against it; it's merely my view of the way the system works, and the article seems to document the way the system works accurately. What might be possible in this (wikipedia) context, is to ask whether the argument for or against has been set down anywhere, and if so, whether to refer to it on this page. --Nick Barnett (talk) 10:02, 28 June 2021 (UTC)
 * This is WP:NOTAFORUM, and it is not a debate site either. Information in the article must be verifiable in reliable sources. As for the weaknesses/strengths of this system, you're free to go and ask whoever maintains the website. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:54, 28 June 2021 (UTC)