MANCRANK is a mathematical system which calculates the success rate of European club teams and then ranks them in order.MANCRANK takes into account all the top level domestic league results from the 52 UEFA affiliated countries during the current season and the previous three seasons. MANCRANK also includes all Champions League and UEFA Cup results from this season and the previous three seasons. In total MANCRANK utilises information from over 45,000 games.
The principle of MANCRANK is based around a simple question with a complicated answer: What is a point worth? It should be obvious that a point earned in the English Premiership is of greater value than, with respect, a point earned in the top league of Luxembourg. Likewise, is a point earned in the German league worth more or less than a point earned in the Dutch league and by how much?
In order to begin to answer these questions MANCRANK utilises a modified version of UEFA’s country rankings which enables the strenth of leagues around Europe to be compared with each other. An average value of each league can then be used in the calculations.
Different European leagues contain different numbers of teams so the total number of points earned in a season is divided by the number of games played to give an average number of points per game. This figure is then multiplied by the European co-efficient which relates to that league’s overall strength. This calculation is carried out each year, for the last four years, and then weighted in favour of the more recent years with the current year being multiplied by 0.4 last year by 0.3 the year before by 0.2 and finally the oldest set of calculations by 0.1 The four totals are added together to give a total domestic value for any given team.
European totals are calculated in a similar way. The Champions League and the UEFA Cup have a mathematically calculated worth, in the same way the domestic leagues do, which is based on the strength of the competition's participants. Points accumulated in the European competitions are multiplied by these values. A weighting factor is also applied to European games to give them equal importance (in terms of number of games) to the domestic games. The four totals are weighted again in the same way as the domestic values to give greater influence to the current season.
The European totals and the domestic totals are then added to give a grand total for each team. Each team's points are expressed as a percentage of the top team's points for ease of comparison. The TOP 50 ranked teams are then published on MANCRANK.
