Power Rankings · Methodology
A six-component framework. Transparent weights. No vibes-based ordering. Built so the formula respects football's structural reality — Botola Pro form is not Premier League form, and the rankings have to know that.
← Back to live rankingsEach one becomes a sub-score on the same 0–100 scale. The Power Score is what you get when you blend them together. Continental performance is the biggest single signal because it's the most direct test of current quality.
What each component measures, and why it carries the weight it does.
Where you are in the European or continental cup ladder right now is the strongest single signal of "current power." A team in the Champions League semi-final is — by definition — beating elite opposition over 90 minutes. A team that exited at group stage is not.
Measures — Furthest stage reached this season across UEFA, CONMEBOL, AFC and CAF club competitions, weighted by the relative strength of each confederation.
How a team is performing in their league — but adjusted for how strong that league actually is. A run of wins in the Premier League is not the same achievement as a run of wins in a smaller domestic competition. The league-strength adjustment is the most important piece of the framework.
Measures — Current-season points-per-game, scaled against the strength of the team's domestic league.
Aggregate squad market value is the single best long-term proxy for institutional power. Wages, depth, recruitment quality, succession planning — they all feed into one number that the transfer market computes every window. We trust it.
Measures — Aggregate squad market value, normalised against the strongest squad in the candidate pool.
Pure prestige, weighted toward recency. A 1981 European Cup matters less to "current power" than a 2024 league title — but it still matters, because gravity and culture persist. The recent column carries more weight than the all-time column.
Measures — A blend of all-time continental trophies and trophies won in the last five seasons.
Points won in the last ten matches. Captures whatever the bigger components miss — the manager change two weeks ago, the injury that just cleared, the mid-season rebuild that finally gelled. A short-window weight on a long-window framework.
Measures — Points-per-game in the most recent block of completed matches.
A small lever for what the data physically cannot capture: a takeover announced last week, a star injury the form metric hasn't caught up to, a points deduction looming. Every adjustment is small, every adjustment is documented, every adjustment is reviewed weekly.
Measures — A reviewed-weekly editorial nudge applied to each club, capped tightly so it can never override the underlying data.
Same framework, two very different clubs. Why a Premier League title contender lands at ~77 and a CAF Champions League contender lands at ~41.
Raja's Continental and Trophies sub-scores are competitive — they're a CAF Champions League contender with a serious history. Where the gap opens is Domestic Form and Squad Strength. Premier League Arsenal play a tougher 38-game schedule and command a squad that the transfer market values at sixty-five times Raja's. The framework isn't insulting Raja — it's correctly accounting for the structural reality.
A short, honest list. Better to know.
A manager who took over last week isn't in the form data yet. The Editorial Adjustment is the lever for that — but it's only a small lever. A top club with a fresh transformative hire could score lower than they "feel" for one cycle.
Continental Performance is the biggest input, and a club already knocked out of Europe has limited scope to demonstrate quality the framework can see. Sample size matters.
UEFA, CONMEBOL, AFC and CAF teams play in different ecosystems. Our weighting between them is the best public estimate available — it is not gospel, and we revisit it each quarter.
Squad value, trophies and continental weighting are all multi-year aggregates. A new project — a Bournemouth, a Como, a Genk — will under-score relative to what a tactically-attuned eye sees on the pitch. We accept that trade-off because the alternative is letting one good month dominate.
A weekly pulse on the things that move; a slower cadence on the things that don't.
Continental stage progress, domestic-league form, recent form. Recomputed every Monday after the weekend's matches.
The relative strength of each domestic league. Reviewed every three months.
Aggregate squad valuation. Refreshed each year after the summer transfer window closes.
Updated whenever a new trophy is lifted. The 5-year recency bias means recent silverware moves the dial; older silverware is a residual effect.
The desk reviews each adjustment every cycle. Documented inline so anyone reading the rankings can see exactly when, and why, an adjustment was applied.