✉️ What to expect from Plot the Ball in 2026
🌍 Introducing 'Rank the Nations': using data to help you understand international sport
2026 will be the fifth year of Plot the Ball’s existence.
What have I learned over the last four? Above the many little things that I’ve shared with subscribers to this newsletter — about Jasprit Bumrah’s genius, for instance, or Spain’s passing skill — stands one basic principle I keep returning to. There is so much value in using simple but rigorous methods to try and accurately describe the world around us. Many sporting debates are still conducted untethered from facts that are often straightforwardly revealed by the statistical record, but I hope that the work I’ve published here since 2022 has helped readers conduct better conversations about the teams and athletes they enjoy watching compete.
Over the last few months, I have been laying the foundations for a major project that is a pure reflection of this principle. Helping readers to appreciate athletic quality and introducing them to new sources of joy will continue to be goals of this newsletter. In 2026, however, I also have a more ambitious goal: the creation of a framework that will help us all better understand the entire landscape of international team sport.
🌍 Introducing ‘Rank the Nations’
Is England the ‘home of women’s sport’? Does New Zealand punch further above its weight than any other country of its size? How does the competitive balance of men’s international soccer compare to that of other sporting codes?
I think these are fascinating questions — but not ones I would know how to go about answering comprehensively based on readily available public data.
So: I’ve decided to create such a data set myself.
The practical objective of this project — which I’m dubbing ‘Rank the Nations’ — is to create a comprehensive archive of senior international match results in every major team ball sport.
Using this archive, I will create basic team ratings for every nation that competes at the top level of each of these sports.
Aggregating team ratings across nations and across sports, I will try and answer interesting questions like those above in this newsletter.
Establishing the scope
How have I gone about scoping this project?
16 team ball sports have featured in the Olympic Games or Commonwealth Games since 2000; those sports are administered by 14 separate global governing bodies.
Those governing bodies administer another 13 ball sports. That gives us 29 sports in total:
Basketball and 3x3 basketball, administered by FIBA;
Soccer, beach soccer and futsal, administered by FIFA;
Field hockey, indoor hockey and hockey5s, administered by the FIH;
Volleyball, administered by the FIVB;
T20I cricket, ODI cricket and test cricket, administered by the ICC;
Flag football and American football, administered by the IFAF;
Handball and beach handball, administered by the IHF;
Ice hockey, administered by the IIHF;
Rugby league nines and rugby league, administered by the IRL;
Water polo, administered by World Aquatics;
Lacrosse and box lacrosse, administered by World Lacrosse;
Netball and fast5 netball, administered by World Netball; and
Rugby sevens and rugby union, administered by World Rugby.
Each of these sports — other than baseball5, in which competition is mixed — has both a men’s and a women’s code, meaning that I will be tracking results across 57 different categories.
In each category, I will track every match result in official global competitions (such as a ‘World Cup’ or the Olympic Games itself) as well as those in top regional competitions (like a ‘European Championship’). I have defined a given sport’s ‘top’ regions as those which have provided at least two top-four finishers in any World Cup or edition of the Olympic Games since 2000.
Finally, any matches in competitions which are artificially restricted in some way — by the exclusion of certain stronger nations, for example, or an official requirement that underage, development or amateur squads compete — will also be left out.
Calculating team ratings
To come up with a nation’s rating in a given sport, I will aggregate these results over a five-year period and calculate:
The percentage of matches played that they have won; and
The percentage of the total points in those matches that they have scored.
The average of those two percentages is then converted to a 10-point scale.
Consider, for example, the England women’s rugby union team. In official competitions between 2021 and 2025:
They won 40 of their 41 matches, for a ‘win rate’ of 97.6%; and
They scored 2,045 points and conceded 435 in these matches, for a ‘point share’ of 82.5%.
The average of their win rate and their point share over this period is 90.1%; converted to a 10-point scale, this gives them a team rating of 9.0 as at the end of last year.
Comparison to other systems
Why not use an Elo system, or simply collate official world rankings in each sport?
The advantage that I see in this method over others is that I can point to any single output — England’s team rating in women’s rugby union above, for instance — and explain clearly in a couple of sentences how it was calculated and what it means.
It’s also worth noting that older match results are not decayed as they might be in a predictive model. This is because I intend these team ratings to function primarily as a description of a team’s performance in top-level competition over the medium term.
Why now?
I think the beginning of 2026 is a great time to launch Rank the Nations for a number of reasons.
Several sports in which global competition already featured prominently have moved to give their calendar more coherence in recent years. UEFA has established the Nations League in both men’s and women’s soccer over the last decade, for example, while test cricket introduced the World Test Championship in 2019; the first edition of the Nations Championship in men’s rugby union will also take place this year.
And even in those where it has typically taken a back seat to franchise or club competition — like the four major North American sports — the international game is taking on greater prominence.
NBA basketball now draws on a greater geographical diversity of talent than ever before; NHL stars will return to the men’s ice hockey competition at the Winter Olympics in February; some of baseball’s biggest names will feature again in the World Baseball Classic in March; and a variant of American football — flag football — will even appear in the next Summer Olympics for the first time, with the door still open for NFL players to feature.
Throughout the year, I’ll be publishing a weekly newsletter using this data set to help you follow and contextualise the biggest team events in international sport.
Then, at the end of 2026, I’ll be revealing Plot the Ball’s first-ever ranking of the world’s top sporting nations.
You certainly can’t tell every important story about international team sport using only match results, but I believe that you have to refer to this historical record to explain any meaningful trend faithfully.
This record is the skeleton that our entire understanding of any sport is built upon: there is much more to any organism than just the skeleton, but you can’t hope to understand that organism without documenting it accurately.
I don’t think a similar project exists anywhere in the public domain, so I’m really excited for Rank the Nations to kick off next week. If you’re not already subscribed to Plot the Ball, make sure you sign up at the link below.
I believe this is insight into international sport that you won’t get anywhere else.
The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday January 19th.