Rugby Fives Association
26th January 2026
How often have you looked at the rankings and wondered, “How are my ranking points worked out? Why have I only gone up a couple of places after doing so well in that last tournament? And how can I climb the rankings?”
In the interests of transparency, here’s a peek under the hood. You can then look at the breakdown of the top 10 players shown at the bottom to help understand how this works in practice.
The RFA official rankings are calculated according to Professor* Will Ellison’s system, which uses the following logic:
Each tournament carries a certain number of points for the winner, categorised based on the strength of the entry (not only the number of players, but also how many ranking points those players have).
The categories start with Nationals, then A, B+, B, C+ and C.
Tournaments that are not ‘Open’ (e.g. Challenger, Universities, U25s) have fewer points.
The different rounds of the tournament get a certain percentage of the winner’s points. Obviously, the further you get, the higher that figure is, up to 100% for winning
Your results from the past three years count towards your total ranking, split into three 12-month periods:
Your best three results (in terms of points, not necessarily how far you got in a tournament) from each 12-month period are counted.
The most recent 12-months stay weighted at 100% of your points scored, whilst the middle 12 months are ‘decayed’ to 60% and the furthest 12-months ‘decayed’ to 20%
There’s one final tweak that brings the ranking points closer together. Your points that have been calculated above get scaled by taking the square root and then multiplying by 10. All this does is bring all players’ points closer together, it doesn’t change the relative positions of players.
This is a fairly new system, implemented in 2022, taking over from Dave Hebden’s magic, and mirroring many of his principles. Dave started the RFA rankings back in the 1970s. He devised a system unique to Fives, crafted to account for the relatively few tournaments held. Our aim with the changes was to increase transparency, and be able to include more players, whilst maintaining the fidelity of the rankings, especially in the top 20.
So, how do you climb the rankings? Simple – play more Fives, both training and tournaments. It’s a winning formula!
Enjoy getting into the details, and please do email us on tournaments@rugbyfives.com if you have any questions and/or suggestions.
Attachments (open in a separate window)
Singles ranking breakdown (at end of 2025)
Doubles ranking breakdown (at end of 2025)
*He’s not actually a Professor (yet)