Data-driven Power Rankings: The world’s top 25 football teams

We do love lists as football fans, but for some reasons it seems hard to compare teams from different leagues across the globe. In this article we will use Opta’s Power Ranking to look at the top 25 teams in the world.

You can see the total of the rankings for a great number of teams on the website of Opta . You can filter for teams, leagues, national and confederation. Now, on to the top 25 teams in the world according to this ranking.

In the bar graph above you can see rankings from 25 to 16. A blue color means that they didn’t change in ranking, red means the dropped in ranking and green means they went up. North Carolina Courage , Häcken, America and Eintracht Frankfurt are looking in form. Atletico Madrid and Tigres UANL are dropping.

In the bar graph above you can see rankings from 15 to 6. A blue color means that they didn’t change in ranking, red means the dropped in ranking and green means they went up. Bayern München, Washington Spirit , Wolfsburg and Paris Saint-Germain are in good form. Manchester United and Orlando Pride have dropped.

In the bar graph above you can see rankings from 5 to 1. A blue color means that they didn’t change in ranking, red means the dropped in ranking and green means they went up. The top 5 of Barcelona, Chelsea, OL Lyonnes , Manchester City and Kansas City Current is unchanged.

In general, it’s really difficult to compare leagues. There are so many variables to take into account. But, this way of ranking teams based on performance related rankings, can tell still tell us a lot. We still have an idea of what the best teams are in the world at this point in time.