Abstract
Sports rankings play a very important role in modern sport. They most often determine who will be considered the favorite of a specific match or fight. In other cases, they decide on the seeding of a player (team) in the tournament, or determine whether he will be able to participate in it at all. There is no one consistent methodology for creating sports rankings. Each discipline has its own rules. Some are based on more or less complicated mathematical calculations, others are based on the subjective opinions of the experts who create them. In this study, we will look at sports rankings on the examples of football, chess and professional boxing, which represent completely different approaches to the methodology of creating rankings.
The FIFA football ranking is based on multifactorial calculations taking into account, among other things, the type of match played, its result, and the expected result of the match based on the analysis of the strength of both teams. In professional boxing, no single ranking has been created so far and each federation proposes its own rankings, to which an alternative may be the system based on the algorithm proposed by boxrec.com. In chess, the Elo system remains the dominant way of classifying players, although alternative methods often turn out to be more precise.