National sporting merit

Zone Zero Cup

A nation's total sporting merit: every major sport, men's and women's, rolled into one score per country, weighted to who's winning now.

Looking for how each national team ranks within its own sport? See The Universal Index: Nations.

225 nations ranked
14 sport pillars
recency half-life 8y

Data as of Β· Rebuilt weekly.

The ranking

The full table of every ranked nation. Switch the ranking basis, filter by region, and sort by merit or current world ranking.

Ranking
225 nations

Total sporting merit. Click any column to sort, or the + on a row to see a nation's full per-sport breakdown. Β§ currently suspended from international competition; ‑ defunct or composite state.

North America
#1
Merit: 220#1 Basketball
American Football, Athletics, Basketball, Motorsport
Merit: 141#1 Cricket
Football, Motorsport, Cricket, Athletics
Europe
#3
Merit: 138#1 Football
Football, Basketball, Motorsport, Women's Football
Europe
#4
Merit: 135#2 Basketball
Football, Basketball, Athletics, Women's Football
#5
Merit: 120#1 Cricket
Cricket, Australian Rules Football, Rugby League, Athletics
Europe
#6
Merit: 118#2 Handball
Football, Motorsport, Basketball, Rugby Union
Europe
#7
Merit: 103#2 Volleyball
Football, Athletics, Motorsport, Tennis
South America
#8
Merit: 98#3 Volleyball
Football, Basketball, Volleyball, Women's Football
Asia
#9
Merit: 92#16 Women's Football
Table Tennis, Badminton, Athletics, Diving
South America
#10
Merit: 90#2 Football
Football, Basketball, Rugby Union, Volleyball
Asia
#11
Merit: 88#1 Baseball
Baseball, Women's Football, Badminton, Table Tennis
#12
Merit: 74#8 Football
Football, Athletics, Cycling Road, Motorsport

Tiers are merit bands, not equal-sized groups: A from 100, B from 50, C from 25, D from 10, E from 4, F from 1, G above zero. The bands are deliberately unequal, because the field is. Today: A 7, B 9, C 27, D 37, E 38, F 44, G 37, 26 untiered. Move compares each nation's merit change over the last 6 weeks with the median change of its own continent, so an arrow means a nation outpaced its neighbours rather than simply that its number went up. Nations under 2 merit carry no arrow.

The Cup by sport

The same points read down the other axis: how much of the Cup each sport accounts for, and who holds it.

How this is measured

Every nation's per-sport points, summed. Share is that sport's slice of all the points on the board. Nations counts everyone with any points in it at all, and top four hold is what the four leaders take of the sport's own total, which is the difference between a sport a handful of countries own and one the world shares. Weight is the prestige multiplier the method applies to a sport's flagship title, where it has one.

National sports are in the table too, marked as such. They are a fixed recognition bonus rather than a scoring pillar: they never compete for a nation's ten scoring slots, which is why American football is a row held entirely by one country. Where a national sport is also a pillar, as rugby league is, the bonus is folded into that pillar's row rather than counted twice.

Motorsport is a bonus for the opposite reason. It is global, but the constructor is a company and the driver's nationality is a passport, so there is no national competition to build a pillar on. The row is decayed championship podiums across seven series: Formula 1 at full weight, then MotoGP, the World Rally Championship, IndyCar, NASCAR, Speedway and Formula E, each weighted for how deep and how international its field is. Champion, runner-up and third score 1, a half and a quarter, the same ratio a world championship podium earns anywhere else on this board. A domestic series is not excluded, it is weighted as one, which is why NASCAR carries IndyCar's weight rather than Formula 1's. Endurance racing is left out for a different reason: its titles are won by mixed-nationality crews, so there is no one country to credit.

Road cycling is a scoring pillar again rather than an Olympic footnote. It had been counted from Games medals alone, which gave the whole sport less than golf, because the Olympics awards two road events per gender against six or more on the track. It now counts the world championship road race, the one race contested by national teams rather than trade teams and therefore the highest-scoring line here, then the Tour, the Giro and the Vuelta, and the women's editions of all of them on the same scale. The Tour winners come from this site's own champions record rather than a second copy. The seven Tours the UCI annulled score nothing.

All 93 disciplines are listed, including the 17 carrying no points today. The Olympic art competitions are among them: painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and music awarded medals until 1948 and stay in the record, alongside croquet, tug of war and the military ski patrol. Competitors that no longer exist are marked † and suspended ones *, which is why an entry such as Individual Neutral Athletes can sit among the leaders.

How the Cup counts it

What the sport is

Every discipline the Cup scores, plus the national sports it recognises. The filters overlap, so their counts do not add up to this one.

1Football612.5
13.2% of the Cup207 nationstop four hold 33%weight 3.0Γ—
2Athletics458.9
9.9% of the Cup121 nationstop four hold 20%weight 1.0Γ—
3Basketball278.1
6.0% of the Cup122 nationstop four hold 29%weight 2.0Γ—
4Cricket184.0
4.0% of the Cup31 nationstop four hold 46%weight 2.0Γ—
5Rugby Union169.6
3.6% of the Cup77 nationstop four hold 32%weight 1.3Γ—
6Women's Football166.0
3.6% of the Cup195 nationstop four hold 29%weight 1.25Γ—
7Ice Hockey151.5
3.3% of the Cup31 nationstop four hold 31%weight 1.5Γ—
8Baseball136.2
2.9% of the Cup24 nationstop four hold 46%weight 1.5Γ—
9Motorsport motorsport133.2
2.9% of the Cup27 nationstop four hold 51%weight bonus
10Volleyball129.1
2.8% of the Cup97 nationstop four hold 22%weight 1.1Γ—
11Tennis128.8
2.8% of the Cup43 nationstop four hold 33%weight 0.9Γ—
12Women's Basketball107.9
2.3% of the Cup71 nationstop four hold 22%weight 1.0Γ—

How it's scored

The Cup is modelled on the NACDA Directors' Cup but built for countries. It counts each nation's best results across the Olympic programme and the major team sports, blends them with current world rankings, and weights recent achievement far above distant history, so the table shows how nations stand today. Switch to the per-capita and per-GDP views to see who punches above their size.

What it measures: titles won and world rankings held. What it does not: participation, spending, facilities, or whether a country is a good place to play sport. A nation can rise here without a single new player taking up a game.

Every medal, title and final is converted to points on one scale, where winning a sport's flagship world title is the anchor. Each result is then weighted by recency on an exponential decay with an 8-year half-life, so a result from two decades ago counts only a fraction of a recent one. A nation's score is the sum of its best 10 sports, which rewards both breadth and depth without letting one sport dominate.

Five deliberate adjustments shape the table. The flagship world titles of the globally contested team sports carry a 7Γ— weight, since a World Cup is a single winner-take-all event rather than one of dozens of Olympic golds. Winter Olympic results are weighted at 0.5Γ— their summer equivalents, reflecting a smaller and less global field. High-volume Olympic sports face diminishing returns so medal count alone cannot run away. Live world rankings feed a present-day strength signal, so a nation strong right now is rewarded even between titles. And nations under blanket international suspension take an inactivity decay for every cycle they miss.

The full method, including the per-sport weights, is on the methodology page. Figures are a model, not an official record.

About this dataas of 1 Nov 2026

ProvisionalNew, and its pillar weights are still being tuned; no automated test yet. About the tiers

What the numbers mean

Every medal, title and final becomes points on one scale anchored on the Olympic podium (gold 4, silver 2, bronze 1), weighted by recency on an exponential decay. A nation's score is the sum of its best ten sports, blended with current world rankings.

Sources

  • Olympic medal tables, Summer and Winter
  • World, continental and flagship championship results in the major team sports, from the site's own results files
  • Current world rankings, including the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking
  • Full method and per-sport weights

How often it refreshes

Regenerated weekly; the page reads the new file without a rebuild. The date shown is the latest rebuild.

Known limits

  • It measures titles won and rankings held, not participation, spending or facilities.
  • Figures are a model, not an official record.
  • Nations under blanket international suspension take an inactivity decay for every cycle they miss.