FUCK the steelers they get the easiest fucking games I swear <| sep |> uNikoClone 3 . Explain . Laser , I ' m on your side now , we need to figure out who did it . <| sep |> I ' m sorry to write on a 5 moth old comment but I felt the need to chime in . Thing is , it doesn ' t matter that the ELO rating tend to converge on a team ' s true strength relative to its competitors after about 30 matches because even then , a country doesn ' t play against ALL countries to know the true skill level unlike chess or other ELO ranked sports which have more instances for encounters , and the amount of international matches are so few in between that I don ' t even consider that ranking predictive , considering so much changes in between starting by the fact that it ' s a team sport , not individual like Chess or Go . And yes , I am aware of the mathetical formula for predicting the result of a match , but there ' s still a lot of issues with this and it ' s too mathematical . For example , it has the same issue as the FIFA ranking in that you could protect your ranking by playing fewer games . Also , the fact many national teams would sacrifice friendly games by putting benched players , affect the expected results , and as such , the resulting new ranking after the friendly . A good example of this is Argentina beating Germany 42 in a friendly just 2 months after losing the WV final 10 , and something similar happened to Spain after winning the WC . Anyway , there ' s so any factors in play that even if mathematically you could predict with the ranking , in practice it just becomes skewed .