How the FC Pro World Rankings work: tiers, points and the three-year cycle

When EA reviewed the 2026 FC Pro World Championship in Paris, it kept returning to one list. It noted that Milkalove was 108th in the FC Pro World Rankings when the event began, it called Vejrgang the world number one, and it called one quarterfinal a mismatch on the rankings, before adding that the rankings mattered little once play began. FC Pro is the official circuit of EA Sports FC, the soccer video game EA publishes every year, in which professionals play one against one, and its world ranking is the table that carries a player's results from one competition to the next.

The ranking matters beyond bragging rights. EA has used it to hand out invitations to qualifiers and places in its own events, and partner leagues have used it to seed their groups. Yet the way points are earned is rarely explained in full. This guide sets out the system as EA describes it on its FC Pro World Rankings deep dive, updated on July 26, 2026: what the ranking measures, the six point tables, how competitions are sorted into tiers, the regional differences, the rules for ties and online play, the three-year cycle that makes old points fade, how often the table moves, and where it has been put to use.

EA Sports, FC Pro World Rankings deep dive, updated July 26, 2026.

What the ranking measures

EA presents the FC Pro World Rankings as a measure of the quality and consistency of the circuit's players across consecutive editions of the game. Two words in that description shape the whole system. Quality is rewarded by the size of the points: a deep run at a major event is worth far more than the same run in a smaller one. Consistency is rewarded by time: the table does not reset when a new edition of the game comes out, so a player who performs season after season stays near the top, while one strong month fades.

Points come from two kinds of competition. The first is the circuit EA runs itself, which includes the FC Pro Open, its qualifiers and cups, and the World Championship. The second is what EA calls select third-party competitions outside the FC Pro ecosystem, which it counts as eligible without naming them on its rankings page. A player's ranking is the total of the points earned across all of them, adjusted for age as described further down.

The result is a single global list. It is not the same thing as the FC Pro Open Ladder, the ranked online table inside the game that opens each season. In the FC Pro 26 season, the ladder ran from September 22 to October 1, 2025, ranked players by their Elo rating, and sent the top players of each region on to the Regional Qualifiers. The ladder covers a few days of in-game play; the world ranking collects results from organized competitions over three years.

Six tables of points

Every eligible competition is placed in one of four tiers, named AAA, AA, A and B, and each tier has its own table of points by finishing place. Two events sit outside the tiers and have their own tables: the FC Pro World Championship, the final event of each season, and the FC Pro Open, EA's main competition of the season. That gives six tables in all.

The gap between them is clearest at the top. A World Championship title is worth 1,625 points, almost twice the 875 points of a win in a tier AA competition and more than four times the 375 points of a tier B win.

The four tiers are built on one scale. Read across EA's tables, a tier AA result is worth about 70 percent of the same place in tier AAA, a tier A result 50 percent and a tier B result 30 percent: 1,250, 875, 625 and 375 points for a win, and 100, 70, 50 and 30 points for 32nd place. The World Championship table sits at about 130 percent of tier AAA, from 1,625 points for the champion down to 4 points for 64th place, against 3 in tier AAA.

The tables also differ in length. The World Championship and tier AAA tables run to 64th place, the AA, A and B tables to 32nd, and the FC Pro Open table to 24th, the size of its field.

The steep top of each table

Inside every table, the points fall fast after the podium and then slowly. In tier AAA, second place is worth 800 points and third 750, only 50 apart. Fourth place drops to 500, fifth to 350, and from there the table descends by small steps: 275 for eighth, 225 for 16th, 155 for 24th, 100 for 32nd.

The FC Pro Open has a shape of its own. Its champion receives 1,500 points, less than the 1,625 of a world champion, and the Open stays below the World Championship from second to fourth place as well. From fifth place on, the order flips: fifth at the Open earns 490 points against 455 at the World Championship, and every place from fifth to 24th is worth more at the Open than at the World Championship. A player who finishes eighth at the Open banks 385 points; eighth at the World Championship brings 358.

The three smaller tiers follow the same curve on a smaller scale. A tier AA competition pays 560 points for second, 525 for third and 350 for fourth; tier A pays 400, 375 and 250; tier B pays 240, 225 and 150. At 16th place the three are worth 158, 113 and 68 points.

Which competitions sit in which tier

EA's page gives examples of what belongs in each tier rather than a closed list. Tier AAA includes the FC Pro Open Global Qualifier, the in-person event that decides most of the FC Pro Open field, and what EA calls Confederation Leagues, a label the page uses without naming the competitions it covers. Tier AA holds the FC Pro Open Cups, EA's regional cup competitions, along with FC Pro Leagues. Tiers A and B also list FC Pro Leagues.

Because FC Pro Leagues appear in three tiers, a league title can be worth 875, 625 or 375 points depending on where EA places that league. EA marks the league entries in each tier as subject to update, as leagues are announced for the season.

The FC Pro 26 season gives a sense of how these events fit together. EA's season deep dive, published on August 9, 2025, set out a path that began with the FC Pro Open Ladder from September 22 to October 1, 2025, moved to online Regional Qualifiers on October 11 and 12, and led to the Global Qualifier at DreamHack Atlanta from October 31 to November 2, 2025. That event opened with a 64-player Swiss stage, a format in which players with the same record meet each other round after round: 48 players from the Regional Qualifiers, 12 invited players and four from a Last Chance Qualifier. The top 32 moved to a double-elimination stage, in which a player is out only after a second defeat, played in four groups of eight, and the top four of each group, 16 players, went through to the FC Pro Open.

The Global Qualifier exception

That number, 16, reappears in one of the rules of the ranking. EA's page states that the top 16 players of the FC Pro Open Global Qualifier earn no world ranking points from that competition. In their place, EA writes, they become eligible for a boosted pool of points at the FC Pro Open.

With the FC Pro 26 format, the Global Qualifier therefore pays ranking points to the players who do not make it through, while those who do are paid at the Open instead, on the higher Open table. A player who finishes 17th at the Global Qualifier, on the tier AAA table, receives 210 points. A player who finishes in the top 16 receives none from the qualifier but goes on to an event where even 24th place is worth 220 points.

The FC Pro Open itself was described in the FC Pro 26 deep dive as a season of weekly group-stage play from November to January, with 24 players in four groups of six, the four group winners earning World Championship seats directly and the finals set for January 26, 2026.

Regional cups: the same event, different values

The FC Pro Open Cups are where the regional side of the ranking shows most. EA divides the circuit into ten regions, and the cups are tiered by region rather than given a single value. On the July 26 page, the cups of Europe East, Europe West, LATAM South and the Middle East are tier AA. Those of Africa, LATAM North and North America are tier A. Those of Asia North, Asia South and Oceania are tier B.

The effect is direct. Winning an Open Cup in Europe West brings 875 points; winning the Open Cup of Oceania brings 375, a gap of 500 points for the same result in the same type of event. Fifth place is worth 245 points in an AA region, 175 in an A region and 105 in a B region.

The regional split was introduced for the FC Pro 26 season. EA's deep dive of August 9, 2025, listed it among the key updates of the season, saying that different regions would provide a different number of points to reflect activity in each region, for all competitions from that season on.

The cups also feed the circuit in another way. In the FC Pro 26 season they were played monthly, in November, December and January, and they gave 28 places in the World Championship Play-Ins, the last qualifying round before the World Championship, with six each for Europe West and Europe East and two for each of the other eight regions.

Ties, online play and other formats

Many brackets do not decide every place. Two players knocked out in the same round often share a finishing position, and the ranking has a rule for that: tied players share the average of the points of the places they jointly occupy.

A worked example, computed from EA's tier AAA table: four players knocked out together and placed fifth to eighth share the points for fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth, which are 350, 320, 280 and 275. The total is 1,225 points, and each player receives 306.25.

The averaging stops at the end of each table. EA's page puts it plainly: "Players who are tied on placements that extend beyond the allocations noted below will not be awarded any points." In a tier AA event, whose table ends at 32nd place, a group of players sharing 25th to 48th place would therefore receive nothing.

The rule applies to portions of a competition, not to the competition as a whole: in an event with an online stage and an in-person stage, only the points of the online stage are halved.

A last rule covers formats other than one against one. When a competition is played in a different mode, EA's page says both players still receive the full allocation for their placement. A pair that finishes second in such an event therefore earns the full second-place figure each, rather than splitting it.

The three-year cycle

The FC Pro World Rankings never start from zero. EA describes them as a continuous three-year cycle, with data from EA Sports FC 24 available from launch, and the points of each game year are reduced at the end of each season. The season ends with the FC Pro World Championship.

EA's example for the FC Pro 26 season gives the weights. Results earned on EA Sports FC 26 count at 100 percent, those earned on EA Sports FC 25 at 50 percent, and those earned on EA Sports FC 24 at 30 percent.

A worked example with illustrative figures shows what that means. Take a player who won a tier AA competition on each of the three editions, for 875 points each time. During the FC Pro 26 season, the newest win counts for 875 points, the one from the previous edition for 437.5 and the oldest for 262.5, a total of 1,575 points instead of 2,625.

The weights rank recent results above older ones without erasing them: a player returning from a quiet season still carries part of earlier results, at the reduced rate of their game year.

World Championship points keep their value

One exception protects the biggest event. EA's page says points earned at the World Championship keep their full value until the end of the next World Championship. A champion's 1,625 points therefore stay intact until the next World Championship ends, instead of being cut at the end of the season like other results.

The 2026 World Championship shows the timing. EA's preview of July 6 set its group and knockout stages for July 22 to 26, 2026, at the Esports World Cup, and its review of July 29 describes five days of play in Paris and a grand final won 6-5 by RvPLegend10, Romania's eSuperliga champion, against levyfinn. Under the rule, the points from that event hold their full value until the end of the next World Championship.

How often the table changes

EA updates the FC Pro World Rankings once a month. Its page adds that more updates may be published after significant competitions, so that a large event can move the list before the next monthly refresh.

That rhythm matters for anything that uses the ranking as a cut-off. An invitation or a seeding based on the ranking depends on which update is read, which is why EA's announcements name a date. For the FC Pro 26 season, the deep dive referred to the ranking as of September 1 and to the ranking following the World Championship.

Where the ranking has been used

The FC Pro 26 season shows several uses. EA's deep dive of August 9, 2025, gave the top 128 players of the FC Pro World Rankings following the 2025 World Championship an early registration invitation to the Last Chance Qualifier, a 256-player open bracket that decided the last four places in the Global Qualifier. The same page explained that one FC Pro Open place went to the top-ranked player on the ranking of September 1, because a player had finished in the top four of both the FC Pro Open and the World Championship that season.

Partner competitions draw on it as well. EA's announcement of November 12, 2025, for the eighth season of the ePremier League, the competition of the 20 Premier League clubs, said its group stages would open after an initial seeding based on the latest FC Pro Global Rankings, the name that announcement uses.

The ranking is also how EA itself frames the field of its biggest event. Its review of the 2026 World Championship placed players against their world ranking throughout, from Milkalove's 108th place at the start to the world number one, Vejrgang. EA's rankings page sets out how the points are earned; how a given event uses them, whether for invitations, seeding or a cut-off, is written in that event's own announcement and rules, and differs from one competition to the next.

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