We use the Opta Power Rankings to see who had the best season relative to every other team in world football. Who are the biggest winners and losers according to our model?
The 2024-25 domestic season is, in traditional terms at least, over.
Following Saturday’s showpiece event in Munich, where Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League for the first time with the biggest win the competition’s final has ever seen, the curtain has come down on what we would usually consider the whole club campaign.
There is the 2025 Club World Cup to come, too, but given it’s the first of its kind and with only a very select group involved, we’re not counting it as part of the season for the sake of this exercise.
That specific exercise is to check in on the latest list of the Opta Power Rankings to see which teams had the best and worst season in terms of their ranking in world football.
The Opta Power Rankings are a global team ranking system that assigns a score to over 13,000 men’s domestic football teams and over 2,000 women’s domestic football teams on a scale between zero and 100, where zero is the worst-ranked team in the world and 100 is the best.
We can use them to objectively compare the quality of clubs from different leagues, countries and continents, though on this occasion we’ve used them to compare a single club’s performance over the course of a season by looking at their position in the rankings today relative to where they were at the start of 2024-25.
The Power Rankings can therefore show us which teams have improved the most over the past 10 months of domestic football relative to every other team in the list, as well as those who have dropped the most.
So, who are the biggest winners and losers from the club game over the course of 2024-25?
The Winners
The Headline Grabbers
Given there are 13,000 teams involved here, there are naturally going to be some big movers from the season just gone who aren’t the biggest names in world football. We’ll get to the teams who have moved up the most places further down the page; don’t worry, Wacker Innsbruck fans.
But focusing on Europe’s biggest and best leagues, a few noteworthy names stand out.
Nottingham Forest had a fantastic season. Although they ultimately missed out on Champions League football, they were for a period of 2024-25 in the Premier League title race and, having narrowly avoided relegation a year earlier, were ranked as the 109th best team in the world last summer.
As we call an end to this season, after finishing seventh in the Premier League, Forest are now ranked 22nd in the world, an increase of 87 places, which represents the best improvement among all teams in Europe’s top five leagues.
Como, led by former Arsenal, Chelsea and Barcelona midfielder Cesc Fàbregas, finished 10th in Serie A in their first season back in the top flight, and as a result, rose 71 places in our world rankings.
Auxerre (+69), Strasbourg (+54) and Bournemouth (+48) make up the top five biggest risers in the top five European leagues, while Wolves (+43), Ipswich (+42), Brighton (+39), Brentford (+39) and Rayo Vallecano (+36) make up the top 10. According to the power rankings, those are the most improved teams of 2024-25 in Europe’s top five leagues. (Note: the Power Rankings model gives more weight to more recent seasons of results, so Ipswich’s improvement is in part because they have been facing tougher games in the Premier League and their wins this season have been worth much more than wins from a few years ago in League One.)
But moving dozens of places lower down the rankings is arguably less impressive than moving up a few places near the top, where overtaking rivals is always going to be more difficult. It’s harder to become a better team than Real Madrid than it is Real Betis, for example.
With that in mind, we can weight each team’s movement in the rankings relative to their starting position. By that measure, Premier League champions Liverpool made the most significant improvement in the world in 2024-25.
Last August, Liverpool were ranked eighth in the world, having finished the previous season third in the Premier League. They then lost legendary manager Jürgen Klopp and only made one signing in the summer.
But somewhat against the odds, they stormed to the title this season, and that coupled with finishing first in the 36-team league phase of the Champions League, beating Real Madrid and Bayer Leverkusen in the process, meant they forced their way up the rankings. The eight-fold improvement in their ranking – from position eight to position one – was by a distance the biggest of all 13,000 teams.
No other team saw more than a five-fold increase in their ranking. Forest come in second in this regard (5x increase), just ahead of Burnley, who earned promotion to the Premier League by shipping a scarcely believable 16 goals in 46 games. Their ranking increased 4.5x, from 205th in the world to 46th.
Al Ittihad, winners of the Saudi Pro League, shot up from 524th to 126th, an increase of 4.2x – the fourth-best in the Power Rankings. Led by Laurent Blanc and fired by the goals of Karim Benzema and the defensive work of N’Golo Kanté, they have moved up above a host of clubs from Europe’s top five leagues.
Wrexham are another of the best stories of the season. Yes, they have decent finances to help them, but the Welsh club undoubtedly deserve praise for becoming the first team in the history of English football to achieve three successive promotions. Their latest one earned them a spot in the Championship next season, having finished second to Birmingham City in League One a year on from coming second in League Two.
Of every team with an Opta Power Ranking in men’s football, Wrexham saw the fifth-biggest percentage increase in their position, with a four-fold improvement. They went from position 1,522 in August last year all the way up to 380th in the world at the end of 2024-25.
Brighton, Aston Villa, Birmingham, Stockport County and Crystal Palace are the other teams to make up the top 10 for the biggest Power Ranking increase relative to their starting position.
The Biggest Movers
When it comes to the biggest risers in position overall in world football, Austrian Landesliga side Wacker Innsbruck come out on top.
Having won their regional section of the Austrian fourth tier with 21 wins, four draws and zero losses from their 25 games so far, while also progressing to the final of the TFV Cup, Wacker Innsbruck have risen a whopping 3,470 places in the Opta Power Rankings.
Macclesfield are the highest recognisable name for English football fans in the list, having risen 2,948 places in 2024-25 under the guidance of Robbie Savage. They won the Northern Premier League by taking 109 points from 42 games, and will play in the National League North next season.
The Losers
The Headline Grabbers
In Europe’s top five leagues, the biggest losers were Real Valladolid, who dropped an incredible 308 places over the course of the season, as they finished bottom of La Liga with a measly 16 points from 38 games – 25 points adrift of safety.
Montpellier (-296), relegated from Ligue 1 with an identical record to Real Valladolid of four wins and four draws all season (though from four fewer games), also dropped way down the rankings. Monza, the worst team in Serie A, were the only other team to fall more than 200 places.
Bochum (-101) and Holstein Kiel (-87) finished in the bottom two positions in the Bundesliga and also plummeted down the Power Rankings, making up the five worst movers.
Girona are sixth in that list, having dropped from 18th in the world following their unlikely title charge in 2023-24 all the way down to 101st as they flirted with relegation this season. Relative to their starting position, their drop to 5.6 times their original ranking represents the worst regression in the world in 2024-25.
Montpellier (4.3x) aren’t far behind by this measure, just ahead of a few huge underperformers across Europe.
The ranking of both Bayer Leverkusen (from position 4 to 17) and RB Leipzig (from 12 to 51) fell by a multiple of 4.3 following disappointing campaigns in Germany. After going unbeaten in 2023-24, Leverkusen finished trophyless and 13 points off top spot in the Bundesliga, while Leipzig recorded their lowest ever top-flight finish, as they came seventh.
Real Madrid and Manchester City both promised so much ahead of the season, but neither won a thing and both fell down the rankings, too.
City might have recovered from their mid-season slump to work their way back up to fourth place in the Opta Power Rankings, but having held top spot for 624 days before they lost it on 26 November, they will be hugely disappointed to record a four-fold drop in their year-on-year position (from first to fourth).
Madrid did precisely the same, dropping to four times as low a position, going from second last summer to eighth this. Both will be hoping to paper over the cracks of their season with Club World Cup glory this summer.
Biggest Movers
Australian side Melbourne Knights aren’t helped by their domestic season not following the same calendar as us in Europe, so they played fewer games in the period we’re looking at than many of the other teams involved, but their form has been an even bigger problem.
They ended the 2024 National Premier League season with a terrible run of results, and have begun 2025 little better, currently rock bottom of the Victoria province section of the NPL. Since last August, they have dropped more places (-5,775) in the Opta Power Rankings than any other team in world football.
Going Nowhere
Eleven teams from around the world have stood completely still over the course of 2024-25. That is, their ranking is exactly the same today as it was before a ball was kicked this season. Of those 11, four are big European clubs who play their football in the top five leagues.
Atlético Madrid (14th), Roma (19th), Tottenham Hotspur (31st) and Marseille (45th) have each retained the same spot in the Opta Power Rankings as they had last summer.
Atlético were in the title race in La Liga for a while but ended the campaign third and trophyless, which is probably exactly what would have been expected of them before the season.
Roma recovered under Claudio Ranieri after sacking two managers to finish fifth in Serie A and qualify for the Europa League, while Marseille endured a turbulent season under Roberto De Zerbi, eventually finishing second in Ligue 1 but never really challenging PSG despite having no European football to contend with.
Spurs had a dreadful domestic campaign, finishing 17th in the Premier League, but their season – and indeed their Opta Power Ranking – was saved by their triumph in the Europa League. They will come away from this season perfectly happy to have ‘stood still’ in our rankings.
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Opta Power Rankings Up Which Teams Rose and Fell the Most in World Football 2024-25? Opta Analyst.
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