How Football Hooligan Rankings Work

How The Scoring Works
The ranking is not just about winning or losing. It's a dynamic formula designed to measure a firm's quality and ambition.

The Core Idea: Quality Over Quantity

The ranking is built on one key principle: beating a strong club is worth more than beating a weak one. To make this happen, the system uses an iterative algorithm where clubs exchange "score points" after each fight. Every club starts with a base score of 1, and this score grows (or changes) based on their results.

Calculating Points for a Single Fight

For every fight, points are calculated and awarded. Here’s how it works:

  1. Team Strength: First, the system calculates the "strength" of each team by adding up what each club on it is worth in this particular fight (see Firms Within a Club below).
  2. Points Transfer:
    • Winner: The winning team receives points equal to the total strength of the losing team.
    • Loser (Consolation Points): The losing team still gets points! They receive 5% of the winning team's strength score, rewarding them for taking on the fight. If the fight lasts longer than 2 minutes, this is increased to 15% to recognize their endurance.
    • Draw: Each team gets 50% of their opponent's strength score.
  3. Point Sharing: In an alliance, the earned points are split evenly among the participating clubs (or proportionally based on each club's contribution if individual quantities are specified).
  4. Uneven Fight Multipliers: When teams have different numbers of fighters, adjustments are made to reflect the imbalance.
    • Winner: Points are adjusted proportionally, clamped between 50% (minimum) and 150% (maximum) of normal points.
    • Loser: Gets normal points (as if fighting at even numbers, no penalty/bonus).
    • Example: If a team of 100 beats a team of 30, the winner gets 50% of normal points (minimum). If a team of 22 beats a team of 50, the winner gets 150% of normal points (maximum).
  5. New Club Multiplier: Clubs with limited fight history receive reduced points to prevent early results from having disproportionate impact.
    • 1st fight: Only 33% of points awarded.
    • 2nd fight: Only 66% of points awarded.
    • 3+ fights: Full points (100%) awarded. Once a club reaches 3 fights, all their previous fights are recalculated with full weight.

Special Factors and Bonuses

It's not just about who won or lost. Several factors can adjust the points awarded in a fight. All these weights are multiplied together.

  • International vs. Domestic: The matchup type changes the stakes.
    • International Win Bonus: The winning team in an international fight gets a +10% bonus on points gained.
    • Domestic Fight Modifier: A fight between two clubs from the same country counts at 100% — the size of the country's scene no longer changes what a domestic win is worth. Fights within certain regions (like Scandinavia or Benelux) are still considered "domestic-regional" and receive a fixed -20% reduction.
  • Time Decay (Relevance): Older fights are less relevant.
    • Fights within the last 4 years: 100% of points awarded.
    • 4-5 years old: 90% of points.
    • 5-7 years old: 50% of points.
    • 7-10 years old: 30% of points.
    • 10-15 years old: 10% of points.
    • Over 15 years old: 5% of points.
    • Date unknown: 5% of points. Some fights are remembered along with who won, but nobody can place them in time. Those are almost always very old, so they are scored as the oldest fights are.
  • Quantity Weight (Scale): The size of the fight matters.
    • Small fights (4v4 or less): -20% points penalty.
    • Large fights (25v25 or more): +10% points bonus.
    • Standard fights: No change.
  • Age Weight (Youth Fights): Youth fights are weighted to give them slightly less impact than open-age encounters.
    • U-21 and younger: The points are scaled down based on a reference of 50 (e.g., a U-21 fight is worth 21/50 or 42% of an open-age fight).
    • U-22 and older: The points are scaled down based on a reference of 40 (e.g., a U-25 fight is worth 25/40 or 62.5% of an open-age fight).
    • Youth, no age stated: Where the report says only "youth" and names no age limit, the fight is scored as a U-25 one — the mildest youth bracket — so it is never worth more than a fight whose age rule we actually know.
  • Blitz Bonus (Decisive Victory): A special bonus is awarded to the winning team for a quick and decisive victory. This bonus depends on the fight's size and duration.
    • +10% Bonus: For large fights (25+ vs 25+) that end in under 1 minute.
    • +15% Bonus: For large fights (25+ vs 25+) that end between 1 and 1.5 minutes.
    • +10% Bonus: For medium fights (10-24 vs 10-24) that end in under 1 minute.
  • Tryouts Match: If a fight is marked as "tryouts," its total point value is reduced to 30% to reflect its lower stakes.
  • Ultras Fight: A fight between ultras rather than firms is worth 30% of its point value, the same as a tryout and for the same reason: the stakes are lower, so the result says less about how strong a firm is.
  • Second Round: A rematch round added as its own fight is worth 10% of its point value, so a meeting that ran over two rounds is not counted as two full fights.
  • Country Strength Multipliers: The strength of your opponent's country affects point values.
    • Beating Strong Countries: When winning against clubs from strong countries (like Poland), you receive a +20% bonus on points gained.
    • Beating Only Weak Countries: When winning against clubs from only weak countries, you receive a -30% penalty on points gained.
    • Losing to Weak Countries: When losing to clubs from only weak countries, your loss penalty is increased by +30% (making the loss worse).

Firms Within a Club

Here "firm" means a named group inside a club — Dynamo Kyiv have Capitals (16 wins, 1 loss) and Fight Company (4 wins, 6 losses). Each is scored on its own record, and a club's total is its firms added together. That decides what a fight against the club is worth:

  • A firm is recorded: the fight is worth that firm alone. Beating Capitals is worth far more than beating Fight Company, and neither is worth all of Dynamo.
  • No firm is recorded: the club turned out as itself and is worth its full score. This is the usual case.
  • The exception: a club that really fights through its firms — two or more of them, in more than half its fights — at 20 or fewer per side. Nobody can say which of them turned up, so it is worth 1.25× the club's average: its firms and its own unattributed record averaged together. Above 20 a side, the full score again.
  • Fan clubs — FC in the name, like Arka FC Tczew — represent their own town, so they are always scored on their own record. In 2019 "Lechia beat Arka" was really Lechia FC Czersk against Arka FC Czersk, two fan clubs from one small town. Their points still count towards the club's total; only a fight against them is valued separately.

No firm's score is shown anywhere — firm pages list wins, losses, draws and fights only. It is still one club; the split exists so that a fight counts against whoever actually turned up.

Final Ranking Calculation

The system repeats this calculation for all fights multiple times (10 iterations). This allows the scores to stabilize, as a win against a team that has also won a lot becomes more valuable. After the final iteration, clubs are sorted by their total score to produce the final ranking you see on the dashboard.

The World Ranking: Country Factor

Everything above produces a club's raw score, and that is exactly what the country tables show. The world ranking applies one more step: every club's score is multiplied by a country factor. It is the same number for every club in a country, so it can never reorder a domestic table — it only decides how countries line up against each other.

The factor combines two things, and a country needs both to rank highly:

  • Scene depth — the country's total points against the largest scene's. A deep, active scene with many firms fighting regularly is worth something on its own.
  • International record — a rating built only from fights against firms from other countries, scored the same iterative way clubs are: you are rated by the strength of the foreign opposition you meet and how you do against it. Domestic results are excluded here on purpose. A Scottish firm beating another Scottish firm says who is better in Scotland; it says nothing about Scotland against Czechia. Cross-border fights are the only evidence that can answer that.

The two are combined as a geometric mean, so neither alone carries a country. This replaced an older method that used scene depth by itself, which effectively ranked countries by how completely they had been entered into the database. Scotland and Austria travel and fight abroad about as often, and about as successfully, as Czechia — but carried factors roughly five times smaller simply because fewer of their clubs had been added. Their firms were being marked down for a gap in our records rather than for anything that happened at a fight.

Thin evidence is treated cautiously. A country's international rating is pulled toward a below-average starting point until it has built up a real record, so a single lucky win abroad cannot lift a whole country. This cuts both ways deliberately: being unmeasured should never beat being measured and average.

Some countries have no international record at all, and for them the factor is a fallback rather than a finding. Kazakhstan is the clearest case — its only recorded foreign opponent is Kyrgyzstan, and no chain of results connects it to any European country, so nothing in the data can place it against them. Kazakh firms are ranked on a starting assumption, not a measurement, and the honest fix is more logged fights against foreign opposition rather than a number chosen by hand.

Final Score Adjustments

After calculating base scores, additional penalties are applied to ensure rankings reflect competitive quality and ambition. These penalties are applied as multipliers to the final score.

Polish Performance Penalties (Non-Polish Clubs)

Non-Polish clubs are evaluated based on their performance against Polish clubs. Poland is ranked #1 among countries, making it the strongest national scene. The penalty structure encourages clubs to compete against top-tier opposition:

  • -30% penalty (0.7 multiplier): Haven't fought Polish clubs OR lost to top-31+ Polish clubs.
  • -15% penalty (0.85 multiplier): Lost to top-21-30 Polish clubs.
  • -10% penalty (0.9 multiplier): Lost to top-20 Polish clubs.
  • -5% penalty (0.95 multiplier): Won against top-21-30 Polish clubs.
  • 0% penalty (1.0 multiplier): Won against top-20 Polish clubs.

Polish Domestic Penalties (Polish Clubs)

Polish clubs do not receive penalties for their domestic fight performance. All Polish clubs receive a 1.0 multiplier (no penalty) regardless of their domestic fight record.

How to understand the ratings

In essence, the ratings are based on three components, in the following order of importance: strength, activity, and quantity. As a result, highly active mid-table firms can sometimes outperform less active top-tier firms. However, a victory over a renowned opponent is always worth significantly more than five wins against weaker ones.

Wins against teams with no age limit are valued at two to three times more than wins against youth teams, and brawls involving a large number of participants also receive a small bonus. From time to time, clearly weaker teams may find themselves in disproportionately high positions, usually as a result of one or two unexpected victories. We also cannot include in the database or in the calculations any agreed-upon meetings that are disclosed to the public, which likewise has an impact on the ratings.

The average observer cannot be aware of all the influencing factors: perhaps the defeated favourite fielded an experimental line-up; perhaps the underdog used side-hustle fighters or used a help from their friends; perhaps it was simply "their day" for some, and the opposite for others. We are likewise unable to assess internal conflicts, generational shifts, or difficulties within acabs that could impact the firm as it stands today. Nevertheless, every brawl is assessed strictly according to the same formula, with no manual intervention.

Like many things in this peculiar world, our ratings are grounded first and foremost in fairness.