Switzerland may be 22nd on the list of men top ten averages compiled by ABB but they win on other factors it seems:

From the Hopman Cup website

• The tournament saw three record night session attendances this week; 13,684 (Mon 2 Jan),13,785 (Wed 4 Jan) and 13,917 (Fri 6 Jan)
• 41,386 people in total attended Switzerlands three sessions, the highest combined attendance for a nations group matches in the tournaments history
• Friday 6 Januarys night session between Switzerland and France saw the events largest session attendance in the Hopman Cups 29 year history with 13,917 attendees packing into Perth Arena to watch Kristina Mladenovic and Richard Gasquetdefeat Belinda Bencic and Roger Federer

No surprises on who the attraction was. Will be missed when he goes and I hope he can go deep in Melbourne next week - ideally a RU finish to Andy's W would be nice 

AliBlahBlah wrote:

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JonH wrote:

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AliBlahBlah wrote:

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Added Map & Table for Top 10 players from each country only.
Country requires minimum 10 ranked players to qualify; there are 43 such countries.
GB are 13th.

https://public.tableau.com/views/20170112ATPCountryStrengths/Top10PlayersPerCountry?:embed=y&:display_count=yes

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 Hi - thanks ABB, this is great and took it a level I never could. I dont know if you have the time to update these every now and then, monthly maybe? My main interest was to see where we stood relative to others and as Paulisi says, we also see Serbia ranking above the GB. But more importantly to see if we progress either relatively or in terms of average rank over the year ahead.

I am also v interested now in seeing if France can pip Spain for top spot as it is v close!

PS Dan helps a little today , long may his Sydney run continue! 

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OK, I've set it up so that it should get each new weeks ATP rankings data - luckily you can grab all the ATP from 1-2000+ in one load, unlike the WTA.

It will update each week, around about when  the new ATP rankings are published.
I've added a date filter, and you can use that on each sheet to scroll back and forwards through time as required. I've back-added in the 02/01/2017 data to show how it works. Use the little arrows or the slider to move the date on each sheet.
At the moment you can't see much change with only two data points, and not much ranking movement between them, but the pattern will emerge over time.
After a few more weeks, I can add in a thing that tracks each point over time, and let's you play it, sort of like a movie, but I need about 6-8 weeks of data before implementing that. This should best show relative progression.

I ditched the map - very pretty, but not very informative - and put in a simpler chart that better shows the ranking relationships, and will serve better for multiple date periods.
Here is the new file: https://public.tableau.com/views/20170112ATPCountryStrengthsv1_1/Top10PlayersPerCountry?:embed=y&:display_count=yes
The old links above will not work correctly now.

I could add in WTA and overall, but the WTA rankings site only displays 100 records per time, and I don't really want to do 13 pages of downloads every week. If someone knows where to get the all the WTA data from 1- ~1270 all on a single page, then I can do it.

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 v impressed! Thanks for this, really helpful! 

Interestingly, shows Argentina and USA swapping places already and Serbia and Japan also, with GB improving 3 ranking places in first week. More probably this week?

JonH wrote:

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 im not technical but can you use live rankings? 

 http://live-tennis.eu/en/wta-live-ranking

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Sadly, they only do the top 700 for the WTA at the moment. However, I did find a way to add in the WTA data that should be low-maintenance.

Updated file: https://public.tableau.com/views/20170112ATPCountryStrengthsv1_1/WTARelativeCountryStrength?:embed=y&:display_count=yes

For the measure by the top 10 ranked players, GB are:
ATP:  #13WTA: #14
Though the overall GB strength on the WTA side is a lot lower relative to it's peers.

I'll do comparisons and the combined ranking if it's not going to be too complex; maybe show the weekly movements/differences.

AliBlahBlah wrote:

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Interestingly, when using the Top 'x' method, the value for 'x' makes a very great difference.
I looked on the ATP at everything from Top 3 to Top 30 per country.
For almost all values of 'x' in that range, France would be top nation.
We choose 10 for roundness and ease, but really it's arbitrary as anything else, and just happens to be one - of two, for the 09/01/2017 data - where Spain actually shade the top spot.

I'll try to update the file in due course, but it means re-jigging the data, and I may not have time for a while.

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 Thanks again, what you have done is a great job and real help - excellent! 

Having a look at the ATP v WTA data. One thing that struck me was that 5 countries in each have an Avg Ranking for top 10 below 100 and similarly 12 nations have an average rank below 200 in both tables. Which suggests that in both mens and womens the spread of strength across countries is fairly similar. Historically, my perception has always been that the men were spread more widely, so that surprised me a little.

BTW, ATP have the 16th Jan rankings out now, Sunday, presumably with AO starting tomorrow. I see GB average would improve to 211 from 215, be interesting to see how the others have changed.

Fascinating work, which I will follow with interest...

But I think that there would be a different way to do it, which would give a very different, and perhaps more accurate result...

which is to aggregate the total points of each nation's top 10 players. It seems a little absurd that if Andy wins the Oz Open, and increases his points lead to 3,500 or so over Nole, he doesn't contribute any improvement to a GB's average position. Whereas if say Liam wins his current 15k, he might go up 20 places, and knock the average down a couple of points.

But Andy winning the Oz Open counts for more towards GB being a stronger tennis nation than Liam winning a Futures, by about 2,000 to 18.

The top 5 or so French players have around the same points as Andy alone - and about the same chance, or less, between them of winning any Slam, Premier, etc than Andy does.

christ wrote:

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Why is 10 the magic number?

Another approach is to just take the top 3 (coincidentally GBR comes out quite a bit better that way)

... or maybe the top 100 - that should weed out some smaller countries, and encourage those with quantity (perhaps rather than - or in addition to - quality).

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Yes, I mentioned this above.
10 just happens to be one value for top 'x' players where Spain tops the rankings.
You can see that for most values of 'x' France are the strongest nation.
GBR Ranking for different number of players goes like this:

I have updated the charts to allow you to pick any number of players between 5 and 30 as the basis for the average ranking.
It will also track the position over time now, to make changes more identifiable
I looked at 3, but there is so much potential skew from countries with one very highly ranked player, which speaks more to the brilliance of the individual, rather than the tennis strength of the nation. By the time you get to 5 it is smoothed out much more meaningfully.

As to Wimbledont's point about ranking points, there is something there, but ranking points vary per tournament, and you can only accrue the points from the tournaments you can get into. This biases towards countries that hold more events, at higher levels - which is probably unavoidable, someone has to hold them.
To try and look at this, I've added another sheet, that plots the ranking positions of the top 'x' players that you set, for which ever countries that you select.
This shows the relative positions of, say the GB Top 17 versus the BEL and FRA, or whoever, top 17's.
Perhaps this new tab shows the gulf in strength between GB and it's peers most clearly: Relative Player Positions Per Ranking
See how far GB quickly lags behind other nations.
Also, try increasing the number of players to 30, and see how, eventually, we do catch up to and overtake Belgium again.
The General picture is true across the board.

Comparing that to the population chart further underlines the lack of depth.

I've only updated the ATP charts so far.

Here's the new link: https://public.tableau.com/views/20170120ATPWTACountryStrengthsv2_2/ATPCountryRankings?:embed=y&:display_count=yes