Transparency
Data & sources
Fulbo's rankings, predictions and stats are built on public, open data. Here we lay out where everything comes from —with its sources, licenses and credits— because we want to be transparent with you.
The Fulbo Elo
It's our own ranking, in the style of the World Football Elo Ratings (unofficial). Every team has a score and, after each match, the winner takes points from the loser: more when the opponent is stronger and when they win by a bigger margin. A World Cup weighs more than a friendly. We compute it by walking chronologically over 46,000 international matches since 1872, so it reflects each team's real accumulated strength. The Win/Draw/Loss predictions come from the Elo gap between the two teams, calibrated against our own historical record.
The FIFA ranking
It's the official ranking published by FIFA. Since 2018 it uses an Elo method (they call it "SUM"): it adds or subtracts points based on the result and the match's importance, without counting goal difference or home advantage. It's the one used to seed the draw pots. We pull it from FIFA's official source and refresh it monthly.
Data sources
Everything you see rests on these projects. Thanks to the people who keep them open.
Results of every international match since 1872, friendlies included. It's the historical backbone of the Elo and the head-to-head.
View license- Kaggle · FIFA World CupPublic datasets
World Cup data (1930–2022): matches, hosts and champions.
- RSSSF · Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics FoundationFree use with attribution
Historical World Cup qualifiers (1934–2014).
- API-FootballCommercial API
Live data for current matches: scores, line-ups and statistics.
- FIFA World RankingOfficial source
The official FIFA national-team ranking.
Fulbo is open source
Fulbo's database —the result of merging, cleaning and curating these sources— is open. We want anyone to be able to inspect, reuse and improve this data: that's why we release the historical dataset and our processing openly.
Note: live data comes from a commercial provider (API-Football) and is not redistributed; what we release is the historical record and our processing. Each source keeps its original license.
Thanks
Fulbo wouldn't exist without the community that keeps these datasets open —especially martj42 and the RSSSF, who have spent decades documenting football history. Thank you.