Top 25 Rankings as of September 2009[1]
Rank	Team	Points	Confederation
1	United States	2197	CONCACAF
2	Germany	2162	UEFA
3	Brazil	2125	CONMEBOL
4	Sweden	2069	UEFA
5	Korea DPR	2026	AFC
6	Japan	2011	AFC
7	Norway	1998	UEFA
8	England	1977	UEFA
9	Denmark	1972	UEFA
10	France	1954	UEFA
11	Italy	1948	UEFA
12	China PR	1946	AFC
13	Canada	1939	CONCACAF
14	Australia	1892	AFC
15	Netherlands	1865	UEFA
16	Finland	1837	UEFA
17	Iceland	1830	UEFA
	Russia	1830	UEFA
19	Ukraine	1829	UEFA
20	Spain	1797	UEFA
21	Korea Republic	1793	AFC
22	Mexico	1775	CONCACAF
23	Czech Republic	1767	UEFA
24	New Zealand	1747	OFC
25	Scotland	1722	UEFA

FIFA Women's World Ranking Leaders

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.

[edit] Differences with men's system

There are several important distinctions in the FIFA Women's World Rankings formula:

• FIFA Women's World Rankings are only published four times a year. Normally, rankings come out in March, June, September and December. However, the dates may be adjusted in World Cup years; for example, in 2007, the third set of rankings came out in October, allowing the rankings to reflect the results of the World Cup held in September. In contrast, FIFA Men's World Rankings are published monthly.
• 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 is not weighted to emphasize recent results, whereas the men's results are weighted on a sliding scale, thus emphasizing recent results.

This results 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.

[edit] Leaders

Team	Times
Germany	16
United States	12

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.

Note that Germany and the USA tied for first in the March 2005 rankings, so though there have only been 27 sets of rankings published, the total in the table above is 28.

[edit] See also

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

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Current rankings and statistics for all countries - FIFA.com
• Mark's Women's World Football Ranking
• The Roon Ba Women's World Football Ranking
• Women's World Football
• Rating procedure - FIFA.com

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