Will Riga claim the Baltic crown? Baltic Power Rankings June 26th Update

NOTE ON THE FORMAT CHANGE: When starting the Power Rankings at the beginning of the season, we did not anticipate the calendars of the three Baltic leagues to become separated by as much as three game weeks at times, which means that in maintaining the synchronous ranking after this rift had occurred, we were forced to move at the pace of the slowest league (A Lyga).

After an internal discussion, we decided to abandon the synchronous ranking and bring all the league up to their most recent game week. Henceforth, rankings will be calculated at time intervals instead of game week intervals. While this change does have a number of methodological and comparative shortcomings, we felt that these did not outweigh the effects that the ‘temporal rift’ between the leagues was having on the rankings.

With Baltic Power Rankings brought up to date with the latest results, it became clear just how intense is the fight for the top spot between the stumbling RFS and the seemingly unstoppable Riga FC is! Now only 25 coefficient points apart (down from 87 at the start of season and 151 after GW4, when the gap was the greatest) and having won two consecutive Big Riga Derbies, Riga FC are on the heels of the 2024/2025 Europa League main phase participants.

Just to illustrate how small this gap really is – if, during the current GW, Riga FC take 3 points from Auda tomorrow and RFS lose to Jelgava later today, the Riga ‘lions’ will claim the top spot in the Baltics by 3 coefficient points!

Elsewhere, Tammeka broke out of the ‘sub-500’ club, reducing it to 5 members. However, Kalev seem to be firmly anchored to the bottom of the table and are now approaching a coefficient threshold of clubs relegated last season, not to mention the risk of becoming the founding members of the ‘sub-400’ club… For a club that debuted in Europe last year, this is quite an ‘achievement’.

Recalibration also highlighted a few ‘hot spots’ on the Power Rankings table. These are:

• Positions 6 to 9 “The Livonian tug of war“: FCI Levadia, FK Auda, FK Liepāja and Paide are there, separated only by 38 coefficient points.
• Positions 14-17 “The Borderlands“: BFC Daugavpils, FA Šiauliai, Narva Trans and FK Grobiņa are separated by only 18 coefficient points. Interestingly, these clubs are all located close to the borders of their respective coutries (Daugavpils and Narva on eastern borders, Šiauliai to the north and Grobiņa to the west). This group is also sitting on the border of Top 15 and Bottom 15 of the Power Rankings, of course.
• Positions 20-22 “Anything but the bottom third“: here, FS Jelgava FC Džiugas Telšiai (both of whom have identical coefficients at the moment) and FK Metta, battle it out for the honours of taking that final (or first, depending on your perspective) Top 20 place. The cost? Only 15 coefficient points of difference!