The Soccer Power Index

Nate Silver, the guy behind the political stats site FiveThirtyEight as well as a system that forecasts baseball statistics, has taken aim at soccer. He joined up with ESPN to produce the Soccer Power Index (SPI), which attempts to accurately rank international soccer teams.

Unlike other soccer ratings systems, SPI is explicitly designed to be predictive -- so a team like Argentina, which in fact struggled to qualify for the World Cup, won't be penalized that much provided the system is convinced that the talent is still there. The two main innovations in the SPI are to incorporate results from club play -- if Cameroonian striker Samuel Eto'o scores a goal for Inter Milan, it will (marginally) help Cameroon's rating -- as well as to incorporate a "competitiveness coefficient" based on the actual lineups that each team used in each match. The latter is important because international soccer clubs play a lot of matches -- friendlies, some second-tier international tournaments -- in which they're essentially sending their taxi squads in, which tell us very little about the teams that will actually be on the field in South Africa next year.

Check out the SPI at ESPN and read the details if you want even more information on how it works.

Team USA is ranked #14, the highest in CONCACAF (Fifa has them #11), Brazil is #1 and American Samoa is last at #211. For all our Mozambique Dropping Timber fans, you guys got #94.