The "slow movement" problem of ELO that you mention is a serious issue though.prasen9 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 25, 2021 4:02 pm Do we get points for these? Or are these friendlies that do not count? In the ELO ratings, they are #82 and we are #162 or so. So, this is great. We get 7 ELO points and Oman loses 7. We need to play more such good teams. I think the coach said that you only improve if you are playing better teams. I agree. Let's get out of the 160-range. We are possibly better than that. But, I am not a big fan of the FIFA rankings. The ELO rankings seem "better" to me although teams move a bit too slowly there if they are not playing much.
Actually FIFA is using the ELO system since 2018. The only thing is that they started it from the rankings of the old system, as of 2018. So, whatever was the ranking we and Oman had in early 2019 hardly changed much till March 2020 when everything shut down. So the rankings are pretty much around where they were when the new system started, for most countries. We lucked out, because the change happened when the old system had (for that time being) over-ranked us to around 100, while it should've been around 125 in quality.
In my opinion, ELO is not great in soccer, and the new ranking system could even be worse than the previous one. The reason is that countries don't play enough matches for ELO to work. It will take 4 years worth of matches (50+) for it to make sense, but a countries' quality could change quite a lot during that period. If we had some perfect quality-ranking, moving up or down by 40% on one's position (100 to 60 or 20 to 12) is very much possible in football. A couple of key players and a coach change is enough for that. But 10-15 matches in a year is not enough for ELO to cause such moves. It moves probably 10-15% max after 15 matches in one year (some countries only play 10-12 on average)... Not good enough.The earlier system had drastically dropping weights (1, 0.5, 0.3, 0,2) for the latest 4 years results, and ELO does not have that kind of time-delay component in it, IIRC. ELO is certainly better, theoretically, but the time taken for enough matches to be played is the issue.
At least that is what I thought some 15-18 months ago when we were discussing it. I haven't looked into it much since then, though, with data.