With the various NPL seasons about to start, here is are the latest rankings.

Good to see this continuing AussieShorter, do pre season friendlies count for state based clubs?

No I haven't included them.  It's too hard to know which are friendlies vs official pre-season competitions and often clubs are trialing players. 

Simplest answer is to have a blanket rule to leave them out.

I'm going to try posting more regular updates and game probabilities but a lot of it will be on facebook - www.facebook.com/TPORankings

Understandable, cheers for the link I'll give it a follow. Keep up the good work.

Which is the best NPL in Australia? How big is the gap between the A-League and the second tier of football? Is the allocation of FFA Cup spots reasonable? I've used the TPO Rankings to do a comparison of the top leagues around the country and hopefully add something to the discussion. 

Looks about right to me, with Northern Territory to fall further as they play more FFA Cup games.

Going off this alone, the FFA Cup spots would be allocated more like this (current allocation in brackets):
- A-League 10 (10)
- NPL Champion - 1 (1)
- NSW - 5 (5)
- VIC - 5 (4)
- SA - 3 (1)
- QLD - 2 (4)
- NNSW - 2 (2)
- WA - 1 (2)
- TAS - 1 (1)
- ACT - 1 (1)
- NT - 1 (1)

nice work

you want divisions to overlap. Looks like most of the npl2 divisions are a little weak compared to npl. Also it would of course be nice to have a 2nd division to bridge that gap

Interesting you say that as I just had a question on Facebook about what a 2nd Division would look like if you take the top clubs from around the country now and put them together.

So I did a couple of hypotheticals.
Version 1 below is just taking the top 16 clubs based on the rankings right now. Version 2 is the top clubs from each state based on a suggested allocation (NSW/VIC = 4, SA/QLD = 2, NNSW/ACT/WA/TAS = 1).

A couple of things to remember though:
1. Taking those clubs from their States reduces the quality of those NPLs, which is why they go down.
2. The 2nd Division bar is based on the quality of those clubs CURRENTLY. In reality, the quality of those clubs would increase as the best quality players outside the A-League gravitate to those clubs. So if/when this happens in reality we'd expect the gap between the A-League and the Div 2 to reduce further.

you would also imagine that the 2nd division would have more players training full time then they currently do when playing in the npl. So I think we can take the above as something of a worst case scenario and it isn't terrible!

Yeah, I see this as an indication of a worst case starting point.

one question is what do you do with the depleted npl comps. Do you just promote npl2 sides and then make new npl2 clubs?

In the case of FNSW they already have an NPL3 competition so clubs can just be shuffled up to fill the gaps and clubs brought up from their State League to fill NPL3.

A-2 League clubs might end up with teams in the state based NPL1, NPL2 or NPL3 comps - as per the current A-League clubs - if so there may be some initial movements between divisions but less need for State League clubs to maintain league numbers.

I've always thought a more transparent method would be best for the choice of Div 2 clubs.

The FFA might decide today that there will be a Div 2 in the 19/20 season.

They decide to make it an 8 team comp and decide to start with a club from each state.

The team from each state with the best record over the next two seasons will be allowed into the Div 2.

They allow those initial 8 teams to remain in the Div 2 and for the next 4 seasons promote the NPL Champion into the Div 2 so it ends up with a 12 team comp.

That way the stronger states begin to fill out the Div 2.

That takes us to the end of the 23/24 season.

From the 24/25 season, the bottom team in Div 2 gets relegated back to their state NPL and the Champion NPL club gets promoted to Div 2.  The NPL RU might have a playoff with the 2nd bottom club if it might be two up/down.

That then gets rid of the weaker teams/states and the stronger states begin to fill out the Div 2.

Very interesting data.

Shows that a second div should help bridge the gap. 

Also interesting to note that the NPL leagues follow a very predicable curve with NSW and VIC then sa qld etc. 

Is there actually a large increase between Npl1 and npl2 teams in ViC and NSW?

The gap between the NPL1 and NPL2 in those states is more pronounced at the start of the season because at the end of 2017 the best two clubs from NPL2 moved up and the worst 2 from NPL1 moved down.  Once the fixtures start you expect that gap to close.

On the other hand, SA has had promotion/relegation for years and there is no gap. NNSW has no pro/rel at the moment and 2018 is the first year QLD will implement it.

My brother and I put together a video talking about the TPO Rankings and the interesting things to come out in the last few weeks.

Warning - production quality is poor and we really didn't know what we were doing, so go easy on us!

Round 1 of The Pecking Order Show

Updated rankings and The Pecking Order Championship discussed in the show this week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ix4Xm8exuQ&t=435s

I've also used the rankings to simulate the remaining fixtures for each league and create a 'predicted league table'.  All of these are at the end of the video.

What's the strongest State in Australian football? How big is the gap between the A-League and the NPL? Based on relative strength, are the FFA Cup allocations reasonable?

This week we compared the States and Leagues around the country.

The Pecking Order Round 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHMXoMrfAwA

How Accurate are The Pecking Order Rankings??

This weeks TPO Show answers the question - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhhMlbi9qFI

Round 5 of The Pecking Order Show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cCwVKp9CwA

Out of curiosity, do you have an all time high score/rank for each team? It would be interesting to see how Brisbane at their peak compared to this Sydney team at their peak (I'd expect Sydney to be higher, but by how much...?).

Good question, and I have looked at it already. I'll keep you waiting on that one though, because I also want to bring the NSL clubs into the question!

Any predictions for the clubs/season you'd expect to be up there?

Mon the Vuck.

Nice. Very happy to wait as it is a big endeavour.

If it was A-League only, it would be a toss up between Sydney FC at the state of this year and Brisbane in 2011-12. Victory towards the end of 09/10 season having come second after winning the year before would be pretty high as well.

• Sydney City are consistently top or near top of the league from 77-85ish and also won a couple of those weird non-counting finals - so they would have to be high. But at the same time  never run away with it and had massive streaks/leads like SFC/Roar did, so it's hard to imagine they got higher. I guess it depends on how short/long-term the formula is (i.e. does winning the league regularly over 5 years but never running away with it trump 2 years where you were untouchable? My guess is it doesn't).
• Marconi in 89-90 but will be pulled down by a poor league showing in 88 (despite winning the finals).
• Knights in the early 90s would have to be high. Towards the end of 92-93 and 95-6 they would have been quite high. The horror 93-4 campaign would have prevented them from having the all time high though.
• South Melbourne at the end of 98-99 and Wolves after 00-01 would both be high as well with both having won the final 2 years in a row (and finishing top 2 on the ladder each time). However again, they never ran away with the comp like we've seen in the A-League era. 
• Perth Glory obviously at the end of the NSL era. They topped the ladder with very few losses. They are my wild card for potentially topping SFC/Roar.

Brilliant analysis, and you're right on the money for a number of those clubs. I'll give you a couple of others that need to be part of the discussion - Adelaide City & Sydney Olympic.

Marconi is an interesting one.  Their peak TPO Score was actually on 30/04/1978, but from 1989 to 1991 they went close to beating that score, and again from mid to late 1993 they were near their peak.

One thing that puts a spanner into this analysis is the FFA Cup. From 1977 to 2013 the total TPO Points that were contained in the League (NSL/A-League) had no way of leaving that league - in other words, the average of the league stayed the same except for whe new teams entered/left (I know there was the NSL Cup, but I don't have the data required to include those games...yet). What that means is that we can compare the clubs with confidence up until that date, without any outside influence.
 
From 2014, the A-League had the ability to increase the average of the entire league by taking (or losing) points from the NPL clubs. Which meant more points were on offer for the strongest club/s.  What I'm seeing is that the A-League clubs that had strong periods after 2014 are ranking higher than you'd expect. E.g. Melbourne Victory, Sydney FC (who would rank highly anyway, but are getting a boost), Adelaide United (peaked May 2016) and even Melbourne City (peaked November 2016). 

Brisbane Roar's run was before the FFA Cup, so they didn't get that boost. So we can easily compare their reign to the NSL clubs. I'll give a little teaser - Roar's peak was almost identical to Sydney United's peak in late 1996 and close to both Wollongong Wolves of 2001 and Heidelberg United of late 1980...

Damn I love this stuff :D

So many complicating factors (which is half the fun, right?). The boost that the cup brings is definitely one I didn't consider (but when I went through the league I ignored the NSL cup as well).

I look forward to the end product. Love your work :)

I've spent some time over the weekend running the numbers, and decided that for the sake of this comparison I'd remove the impact of the FFA Cup.

It's too interesting not to do a countdown, so I'll put a video together and share it on our youtube show, but here's the first of the top clubs - West Adelaide.

The images only show the TPO Score for each club while they were in the top flight, which is why there's nothing after they dropped out of the NSL.

Top 25 at the moment (and the best club from each state outside the top 25):