Elo Ratings for women’s football
While there are many attempts to rank (European/Global) teams in men’s football, there does not seem to exist a (official or inofficial) ranking for women teams in Europe (or the world for that matter). Since the official FIFA ranking of national teams is based on the Elo rating system, we created a ranking of European teams based on the this rating system.
The factor \(K\) for domestic league matches is set according to the UEFA women’s Champions League Association Coefficient Rankings. For top-tier countries (Germany, France, Sweden and England) \(K=30\), for second-tier countries (Spain, Russia, Italy and Denmark) \(K=25\) and for third-tier countries (Czech-Republic, Austria, Scotland, Norway and Switzerland) \(K=20\). For the remaining countries, the factor is set to \(10\). For Champion’s League matches, \(K\) is set to \(30\) for the qualification round and \(60\) for the main stage.
The initial value of the ratings is set to \(1500\) (clubs from top-tier leagues), \(1400\) (second-tier), \(1350\) (third-tier) and \(1250\) (remaining teams). Both the \(K\) factor and initial ratings are differentiated between sets of leagues is due to the still existing discrepancy between women’s football in different countries and should help to not overestimate the rating of lower-tier teams.