PELE International Football Rankings ⚽

What happens when you blend 150+ years of soccer history and player market values into a brand-new model? You get PELE, our insanely detailed, predictive rating system for all 211 FIFA teams.

The 2026 World Cup will begin on June 11, creating the biggest spectacle in the history of the sport: 48 teams, 104 matches, $11,000 tickets, and three hosts: Mexico, Canada and the United States. It will also be a referendum on the state of the U.S. soccer program: one that, based on our recent results, we might not be prepared to pass in a blaze of red, white and blue glory.

But World Cup time also means “model time” to me. I first designed a soccer rating system, Soccer Power Index, for ESPN in advance of the 2010 World Cup; we later extended it into SPI 2.0 at FiveThirtyEight. While SPI was a good system, I’ve spent a lot more time developing sports models since then.

PELE, our new international soccer model, combines the best features of SPI with some tricks we’ve learned from our newer models. It uses a mix of match results, player market values, and historical economic and geographic data, and is obsessively customized to the peculiar contours of the global sport.

We’ll use PELE, Predictive Elo with Lineup Equilibria, to power our official Silver Bulletin World Cup projections once rosters are finalized in a few weeks. But rather than being a placeholder for SPI, we think PELE has a lot of value on its own — in fact, it might be my favorite model we’ve worked on. Starting today, we’ll publish our PELE ratings for all 211 FIFA teams, covering all years since 1872, and update them whenever new matches are played.

You can get a more formal introduction to PELE on the methodology page. But the best way to demonstrate the breadth of the system is by example. So let’s start with our overall PELE ratings. One tip: we’d encourage you to view PELE on the web rather than in email or the app.

---

PELE ratings

Each team gets a continuously updated pair of ratings: PELE and Tilt. PELE is the headline number that predicts overall team quality. It’s essentially a variation of an Elo rating system, though it’s affected by changes in player market values and player ages as well as match results. Argentina and Spain are essentially tied for the top slot as we head into the 2026 World Cup. But you’ll have to scroll down a few pages to find the United States.

The rest of this page contains:

• A comparison of PELE and FIFA rankings;

• Tilt ratings;

• Offense, defense and round-robin results;

• Future match projections, including for the 2026 World Cup group stage;

• The Atlas of PELE, our 12 footballing regions and home-field advantage;

• Market values and projected team trajectories;

• And, detailed historical PELE data since 1872, including the best teams of all-time.

The last few “advanced” sections are a bonus for paying subscribers. We greatly appreciate your support and we’ll consider extending PELE to club soccer depending on the amount of interest in the model.

---

Ready for some ranking controversies? You can already get a few hints for how PELE differs from other systems. Because PELE is designed to be predictive, it can be more sympathetic to recent underperformers like Germany (#7 in PELE, #10 in FIFA) and more skeptical of teams on a possibly unsustainable hot streak (FIFA has Morocco #8; we have them #22). It also tends to like South American teams better than FIFA. And market value data can help teams with star talent like Norway in PELE.

---

Tilt ratings

Offense and defense are more fluid in soccer than in sports like American football, but there are some predictable patterns. Tilt ratings indicate a team’s tendency toward attacking or defensive play. They are based on both long-term tactical preferences and the personnel on the field — the presence of Erling Haaland makes Norway more attack-minded than they otherwise would be. Tilt measures the impact on the total number of goals scored combined between both teams.¹ For instance, if Germany’s Tilt rating is +.6 (“very attacking”) that means games involving Germany will tend to feature 3+ goals rather than the ~2.5 that is more common in modern international matches.

---

Offense, defense and round-robin results

Now that we have both PELE and Tilt ratings, we can do some neat things. Most importantly, we can forecast matches! Our round-robin results project every pairwise combination of match results between the 211 current FIFA members (weighted slightly toward more challenging matchups²). Also, this process allows us to derive offensive and defensive ratings for each team, as measured by the projected number of goals scored and allowed against the same competition. Teams with negative Tilt ratings like Colombia and Senegal will produce lower-scoring matches with more draws.

---

Future match projections

But better yet, let’s forecast some actual games. We’ve uploaded the schedule for all future international matches that we’re aware of. This includes group-stage matches for the 2026 World Cup, though our ratings for World Cup games will be slightly tweaked later once rosters are finalized.³