Manchester United have moved up 10 places in the latest global rankings released yesterday while Premier League champions Manchester City keep their top spot.
FiveThirtyEight have published their new 'Global Club Soccer Rankings', which rates the overall strength of a team compared to clubs across the world. In their latest update, United did not feature in the top 20 clubs around the world, but have made significant improvement since Erik ten Hag took over as they rise 10 places to 22nd in the table.
United are the 6th highest Premier League team as they find themselves one place below Italian giants Napoli, but one place ahead of La Liga's Real Sociedad. At the top of the rankings, Man City remain as the number one ranked club as they sit ahead of Bayern Munich in second, with Liverpool falling down the rankings to third.
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FiveThirtyEight use a "Soccer Power Index" which is their best estimate of a team's overall strength. In their system, they assign an offensive rating and a defensive rating for each team. Offensive ratings refer to the number of goals a specific team is expected to score against an average team on a 'neutral field', and defensive ratings represent the number of goals the same team would be expected to concede.
This data then produces an overall SPI rating, which represents the percentage of available points a team would be expected to take if two teams played each other over and over again. They can then extrapolate the data to assign each team across the world with an SPI rating based on how previous matches played out in real life.
City's SPI, the best in the world, comes in at 92.3, a 17.1 point advantage over United who have an SPI of 75.2. FiveThirtyEight conclude that the average offensive rating for United is 2.1 while their defensive rating is 0.7. Comparatively, City's offensive rating is 2.9 with a defensive rating of 0.3.
Here is a list of the top 25 teams:
- Man City
- Bayern Munich
- Liverpool
- PSG
- Real Madrid
- Chelsea
- Ajax
- Barcelona
- Inter Milan
- Tottenham
- RB Leipzig
- Atlético Madrid
- Dortmund
- RB Salzburg
- Porto
- Sporting
- Arsenal
- AC Milan
- Leverkusen
- Villarreal
- Napoli
- Man United
- Real Sociedad
- Benfica
- Aston Villa
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