FIFA Women's Rankings

An easy way to access FIFA Women's Rankings by date from 2003 up to today.

This data is readily available through FIFA's data API, simply made available here as a CSV file for easy access:

fifa_womens_rankings.csv

However, one major change has been made to the data, and three minor changes.

Major difference from the FIFA data API.

1. Four new columns have been added to the dataset, all of them with a column name prefix of lagged_

They are as follows.

1. lagged_ranking_date

• As each observation has values for both previous_rank and previous_points, but no information on the date of said previous rank and previous points, this is an attempt to amend that by applying a lag of 1 to the ranking_date column.

2. lagged_rank

• This is the equivalent of previous_rank but is achieved by applying a lag of 1 to the rank column.

3. lagged_points

• This is the equivalent of previous_points but is achieved by applying a lag of 1 to the points column.

4. lagged_true

• This column is a complement to the three previous lagged_ columns. Lagging leaves explicit NA values for the first time each national team appears in the data. For convenience I've filled in those NA values with data. This makes it unnecessary to make changes to the actual data in the previous_rank and previous_points columns where it's seemingly erroneous. With lagged_ranking_date it's easier, for instance, to do fuzzy joins with other datasets based on the time intervals between rankings.

This is how the data is inserted:

column	data inserted
lagged_ranking_date	"2002-12-31"
lagged_rank	corresponding previous_rank value
lagged_points	corresponding previous_points value

The lagged_true column only serves to denote which of the rows are the results of the actual lag function (the rows where the value of lagged_true is "TRUE) and which ones are the rows with the aforementioned inserted data (the rows where the value of lagged_true is "FALSE".

Minor differences from the FIFA data API.

1. country_name values have been harmonized to ensure that country name spellings stay consistent throughout all the rankings.

2. country_code values have been harmonized to reflect the current country code, not the (now obsolete) country code at the time of each ranking.

3. Column names are now in snake_case.