FIFA Women's World Rankings

Top 25 Rankings as of December 23, 2011
Rank	Change	Team	Points
1		United States	2148
2		Germany	2143
3	1	Japan	2106
4	1	Brazil	2093
5		Sweden	2073
6	1	France	1990
7	2	Canada	1989
8	2	England	1983
9	1	North Korea	1967
10		Australia	1956
11		Italy	1937
12		Norway	1908
	2	Denmark
14	1	Netherlands	1897
15		Iceland	1854
16		South Korea	1845
17	1	Spain	1841
18	1	China PR	1831
19	1	Russia	1812
20	1	Finland	1802
21	1	Mexico	1774
22		Scotland	1770
23	2	Ukraine	1767
24		New Zealand	1752
25		Switzerland	1733

The FIFA Women's World Rankings for football were introduced in 2003, with the first rankings published in March of that year, as a follow-on to the existing FIFA World Rankings for men. FIFA Women's World Rankings attempt to compare the strength of internationally active teams at any given time.

Specifics of the ranking system

• FIFA Women's World Rankings are based on every international match a team ever played, going back to 1971, the first FIFA-recognized women's international between France and the Netherlands. (The men's ranking system considers only matches in the last four years.)
• FIFA Women's World Rankings are implicitly weighted to emphasize recent results. (The men's results are explicitly weighted on a sliding scale.)
• FIFA Women's World Rankings are only published four times a year. Normally, rankings come out in March, June, September and December. (In World Cup years, dates may be adjusted to reflect the World Cup results.)

The first two points result in a FIFA Women's World Rankings system which is far more similar to the Elo football rating system; ratings for teams with fewer than 30 matches should be considered provisional..

Leaders

FIFA Women's
World Ranking Leaders

To date Germany and the USA have been the only two teams to have led the rankings. Between them, they held the top two spots from the third set of rankings in October 2003, immediately after the 2003 FIFA Women's World Cup, through the December 2008 rankings. Germany was third behind Norway in the first two rankings, and dropped out of the top two in March 2009, replaced by Brazil, though their successful 2009 Euro title defense pushed them back into the top two for the September 2009 ranking, where they have remained.

See also

• Algarve Cup
• Elo football rating
• FIFA Women's World Cup
• FIFA Men's World Rankings
• Statistical association football predictions
• Women's association football around the world

External links

• FIFA/Coca-Cola Women's World Ranking at FIFA.com
• Women's World Ranking Procedure at FIFA.com