[1] Meetings were attended by FIFA staff and external experts and a large amount of research was conducted by this group, resulting in the new ranking system.
Notable changes include the dropping of the home or away advantage and number of goals from the calculation, and the simplification of many aspects of the system.
In previous years a complicated system of points allocation was used, depending on how strong the opponent was, and how large the loss margin, which allowed weaker losing teams to gain points when playing a much stronger opposition, if they managed to put up a decent match.
FIFA states that it wishes to recognise that friendlies are still important, since they make up half of the competitive matches counted in the rankings.
[7] FIFA also stated, however, that it did not plan to make any adjustment for teams that qualify directly for major tournaments.
[16] The confederation weighting for AFC was increased in August 2011 from 0.85 to 0.86[17] after a computer programmer found an error in FIFA's calculations.
[15] Matches played over the last four years (48 months) are included in the calculation, but there is a weighting to put more emphasis on recent results.
The most recent team to be temporarily absent from the rankings is São Tomé and Príncipe (reinstated in November 2011, after having been removed in December 2007).
The final ranking points figure for a single match is multiplied by 100 and rounded to the nearest whole number.