VALORANT Global Power Rankings Explained, Best 10 Teams Revealed

Riot Games has rolled out the VALORANT Global Power Rankings (GPR), a data-driven rating system powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that quantifies the strength of every international league (IL) team worldwide. In a competitive structure where most matches are played regionally, GPR aims to provide a transparent snapshot of global performance and allow comparisons across leagues.

What is the VALORANT Global Power Rankings?

The Global Power Rankings were built to add clarity to cross-regional debates in Valorant. By blending team-level Elo with league-level Elo, the model creates a Power Score that reflects not only a team’s own record but also the strength of the league they compete in.

In practice, this means that if GPR predictions align closely with tournament outcomes, then the event is proceeding as expected. But if GPR falls behind, it highlights where the major upsets are occurring. The rankings update daily, ensuring that sudden surges in form — or unexpected collapses — are quickly reflected.

The Formula behind VCT Power Rankings

In an X post revealing the new rankings, Riot explained how, in their words, ‘developing an Elo system consisting of individual team Elo and league-specific Elo was the best approach’. They explained how ‘VCT experts’ were used while testing the rankings, and ‘determined that an 80/20 weighting of Team & League Elo produced the greatest predictive accuracy’.

‘The weighted average that blends team Elo and individual elo, which we deemed the “Power Score” formula, can be expressed as:

‘Here, x and y represent the weights assigned to Team Elo and League Elo, respectively. These factors are core to the GPR model.’

Impact on teams’ ratings:

1. Elo-Based: Winning a match against a team with a higher power score will have a greater positive impact on a team’s rating. Conversely, losing a match against a team with a lower power score will have a greater negative impact on a team’s rating.
2. Recency Bias: The most recent matches have the strongest effect on a team’s rank, ensuring that GPR is better able to capture which teams are strongest right now.
3. International Bonus: Match wins at Masters & Champions have a greater impact on a team’s rating. However, the effect of losses is slightly reduced to guard against over-punishing teams for simply qualifying for these global events.
4. Regional Strength: Each region’s aggregate performance at global events accounts for 20% of teams’ power score. This helps to normalize the ratings of teams in stronger regions (with a more difficult path to qualifying for global events) with ratings of teams in weaker regions (where strong IL performance is less predictive of success at global events).
5. Stakes Matter: For ILs and global events, playoff matches have a greater impact on a team’s rating compared to regular season or Swiss stage matches.

Additional factors in the GPR model with less overall impact:

• Round Score: GPR considers margin of victory, so a dominant 13-0 stomp provides a larger boost than a narrow 13-11 map win. However, winning or losing the match is still the biggest determinant of power score changes.
• Performance on Attack/Defense: The model keeps track of teams’ performance on attack and defense, so an unexpected round win (e.g., defender round win on an attack-dominated map) provides a slight boost.
• Performance on Eco/Buy Rounds: The model also keeps track of teams’ performance in buy and eco situations (simplified to greater/less than a loadout value of 8,000 credits), so an unexpected round win (i.e., eco round win) provides a slight boost.

‘This is the first step to an objective measure of strength that can accurately compare teams from around the world.’

Future of the VALORANT Global Power Rankings

Riot has signaled that 2025 is only the beginning. Future updates may include:

• Deeper eco and situational round data.
• Player-level power ratings feeding into team scores.
• Dynamic weighting for teams based on qualification stakes.

These improvements aim to make the GPR an increasingly precise global measurement of Valorant performance.

Current VALORANT Global Power Rankings (September 2025)