Manchester City have been ranked number one in FiveThirtyEight’s Global Club Soccer Rankings with Manchester United positioned in seventh place.

Premier League winners Liverpool were third, behind Bayern Munich in second, with Paris Saint-Germain in fourth, Barcelona in fifth and Real Madrid in sixth position.

RB Leipzig surprisingly ended up eighth behind United, with Chelsea and Atletico Madrid making up the rest of the top ten.

The way the ranking is calculated is quite complicated. It uses Opta stats, the market value of the playing squad based on Transfermarkt and FiveThirtyEight’s own SPI Rating.

The SPI rating is a combination of a club’s strength in both attack and defence. The offensive rating looks at the number of goals a team are expected to score against a bang average team on a neutral venue. The defensive rating is the corresponding measurement for the number of goals the team would be expected to concede. This then calculates the average number of points each team would collect over the course of the season.