ESPN, through Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus and Fivethirtyeight.com fame, has rolled out a Soccer Power Index that intends, "to provide the best possible objective representation of a national team's current overall skill level."  I'm looking through the explanation of the index and at first glance it attempts to make the best of the statistics available, while at the same time aware of its limitations. 

Nate is a very good statistician and I respect his work at his other sites. His work on this effort is very detailed and there is much to discuss as far as his weighting to certain variables.  I'll definitely come back to this in the coming days.