No you cant do it objectively , as there the Fifa ranking gives you nothing to compare . For example , Argentina is ahead of Brazil . so what ? We can ' t check anything here as the Fifa rankings don ' t gives us nothing to compare against the real world , except your opinion and the rankings opinion . Elo , on the other hand , gives you probabilities , so we can see if the model is reflecting reality . For example , at the moment , Brazil is 100 points ahead of Chile , so it is expected to score 64 %. Obviously , we can ' t make Brazil play Chile 1000 s of times to check this , but there is another way . First , we get our database and check all the games which had a 100 points delta 2000 x 1900 , 1900 x 1800 and so on and see if the team with more points scored close to 64 %. If this is not true , there is something weird and the model should be changed . Then we do the same for all the deltas for example , 200 points delta means 76 % of score for the stronger side and so on . This is just a simple example , there are a lot of other ways to test it once you know the probabilities and have the database . But can ' t you do the same thing with the FIFA rankings . Sure , not necessarily with checking that Argentina is the right distance ahead of Brazil , but you can look in a database and check every game played between teams that are , say , one rank apart or you could do it with point distances , like the rankings are actually based on . If the higher ranked team wins more often , you ' re doing the right thing in your rankings . The fact that you don ' t give specific percentages to specific points differences doesn ' t mean that you can ' t check your model .