International Football Elo Rankings

The International Football Elo Rankings are a set of rankings of national football teams based upon their performance in international play kept and maintained by Bluth Corporation. As the name indicates, these rankings use the Elo rating system as their basis.

Originally, the IFER was planned to consist of three sets of rankings. The All-Time Rankings would every team that is known to have played an international football game since the event retroactively named World Bowl 0, and the records include all games since that time; the Last-3 Rankings, which included all teams and games played in the time span of the last three completed World Bowls, including friendly games played that were not part of a World Bowl tournament and any other tournaments that may have been held; and the Last-5 Ranking which was functionally equivalent to the Last-3 Rankings except it would have consisted of the time span of the last five completed World Bowls; until the conclusion of World Bowl V, it would have been no different from the All-Time Rankings.

This plan was maintained through the conclusion of World Bowl III, with first set of Last-3 Rankings being released at that point. However, when calculating the rankings post-World Bowl IV, it was determined that it had become too cumbersome to maintain a Last-5 ranking and All-Time ranking, and that the All-Time Rankings were additionally meaningless. The decision was made at this point to only release what had been referred to as the "Last-3 Ranking", and since it was the only ranking released that designation was dropped and replaced with "International Football Elo Rankings."

When calculating the rankings post-World Bowl VIII, a further change was made so that all teams start out with zero points rather than 1500.

New rankings are released upon the conclusion of every World Bowl. Historical post-World Bowl rankings are linked from their respective World Bowl pages; the current rankings are also reproduced below.

Current Rankings