The 2018-19 season has been a roller coaster ride for a number of top European clubs.
It turned out to be a great season for the Premier League clubs as both the UCL and UEL finals were all-English affairs. But former big names like Barcelona and PSG, the campaign was a real eyeopener.
And now with the 2019-20 just around the corner, the folks at Five Thirty Eight have come out with their global club rankings.
But before we dive into it, let’s just check out how the whole project works and on what basis are the rankings made.
As per the official website of Five Thirty Eight:
“The forecasts are based on a substantially revised version of ESPN’s Soccer Power Index (SPI), a rating system originally devised by FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver in 2009 for rating international soccer teams.
“We have updated and adapted SPI to incorporate club soccer data going back to 1888 (from more than 550,000 matches in all) that we’ve collected from ESPN’s database and the Engsoccerdata GitHub repository, as well as from play-by-play data produced by Opta that has been available since 2010.”
Initially, when the rankings were announced it caused a huge stir amongst the fans are there were some crazy additions to the top of the list.
For instance, one Twitter user found that Olympiacos were ranked about last season’s UCL finalists Spurs while Man City. And even Atlanta managed to find a spot above Mauricio Pochettino’s men.
The algorithm at @FiveThirtyEight is high. Olympiacos in top ten over UCL finalists Tottenham 🙄 pic.twitter.com/r0GoNK017K
— ⭐️💜Sean Heffley💜⭐️ (@PancakeHat) July 14, 2019
But to make things clear these rankings are dynamic and they keep changing after every match.
The website explains: “As a season plays out, a team’s ratings are adjusted after every match based on its performance in that match and the strength of its opponent.
“Unlike with the Elo rating system we use in several other sports, a team’s rating doesn’t necessarily improve whenever it wins a match; if it performs worse than the model expected, its ratings can decline.”
At the time of writing this article, the top 10 had four English clubs apart from Man United(17th) and Arsenal(18th).
Scottish Premiership Champions Celtic were 98th on the table while Steven Gerrard’s Rangers were 131st.
Right now the teams are being judged on a pre-season SPI rating which is based on the end of the previous season’s SPI rating and the market value implied SPI rating.
Here’s the top 10 list(when the article was written):
To view the current rankings you can visit their website.
