Algorithm PageRank used to determine the most successful football teams

The algorithm for ranking entities known by Google due to the number of reciprocal links between them was used by two researchers from Macedonia to determine which football team should be on the throne of the strongest. As a result, it turned out that mathematics could not be better in line with reality - Brazil was at the top of the pedestal. Article published on arXiv.org.

The research methodology was based on statistics from national football teams participating in World Cups. Since 1930, 210 teams of different states have played around 7,000 football matches. During this time, more than 20,000 goals or 4.3 goals per match were scored.

Having placed the football teams in the nodes of the graph, the weight of the ribs of which depended on the result of the opponents ending the match, the researchers assumed that the weight of the team should increase if it beat a stronger team. PageRank was applied to the received network.

According to the results of the algorithm, the teams are located in this order:

• Brazil
• Italy
• Germany
• Netherlands
• Argentina
• England
• Spain
• France

The world king of football was Brazil, whose team played more games than any other team. Also, the Brazilians won the most games and scored the most goals. The results obtained are slightly different from the official data. The first three according to FIFA - Brazil, Italy, Germany - correspond to PageRank, but Argentina takes the place of the Netherlands.