Rugby league world rankings and the ELO system

[clarency]

I've been really interested in how world rankings are calculated and have come across the ELO ranking system that is used as an alternative to the FIFA world rankings. It was originally created to rank chess players but the original formula has been modified to incorporate team sport factors (e.g. Point difference, home advantage, etc).

I think this could easily be adapted to rugby league to create a more reliable ranking system, however I don't actually know anything about how the current rankings are calculated. I can't find very much information on formulas of the existing ranking system so it is difficult to really say if it is good or bad. One thing I will say is that I think the existing method is very lazy through its inability to account for the number of games (or lack thereof) impacting a teams ranking.

That said I think this subforum does a good job keeping up to date with various international scores and collectively we could create and maintain an up to date ranking list.

Think it could work? Do we even need it?

 

[vamosrafa]

There is already a website that keeps and maintains an elo ranking for international, nrl and RFL teams.

http://www.rugbyleagueratings.com/international.php

 

[clarency]

Perfect! This is exactly what I was looking at.

This should be getting more attention.

 

[docbrown]

Nice, I hate the skew that RLIF rankings have towards more recent matches. As the big 3 play more matches more often against each other the disparity between them and the rest is increased too much.

Expressing the two system as a % compared to the leader -

RLIF
Australia 100%
NZ 67%
Eng 50%
Fra 19%
Wal 18%
PNG 17%
Fij 8%
Sam 7%
Ire 6%
Ton 6%

Do we really think NZ is only 2/3rds as good as Australia? England half? Fiji 8%?

compare that to the ELO system -
Aus - 100%
NZ - 85%
Eng - 80%
Fij - 61%
Ton - 60%
Sam - 60%
PNG - 59%
Fra - 56%
CIS - 54%
Wal - 50%

I'd say the ELO system is a much more accurate representation.