New Players under the FIDE Flag
A couple of weeks ago, I posted this blog's annual discussion of international ratings, FIDE Rating List - January 2025 (January 2025). I ended it saying,
Last year's only followup post, Players under the FIDE Flag (January 2024), might be worth a revisit because FIDE's (FED = 'FID') percentage increase was the fourth highest [2025 over 2024].
Here are the numbers for FIDE again:-
Fed 2024 2025 Incr
FID 798 1008 26.32%
That means the list had 210 more 'FIDE' players (i.e. listed without a national federation) at the start of 2025 than at the start of 2024. The 2024 FIDE Flag post (*) also listed the total number of FIDE players for each of the last five years. Here's a continuation of the same list, adding the count for 2025:-
2023 : 394
2024 : 636
2025 : 766
Why the difference between 1008 players in the first table and 766 players in the second? It's probably because I eliminated players registered only to play on the FIDE Online Arena (FOA). I don't think it was a good idea for FIDE to mix online players with OTB players, but that decision was made some time ago.
Of those 766 FIDE players in 2025, 130 appear to be new FIDE players (766 - 636 in 2024). When I searched for the *names* of new FIDE players in 2025, I found 124. The difference of six players isn't trivial, but I decided to ignore it for now. The 124 new FIDE players in 2025 were listed under the following federations in 2024:-
Fed : Ct
RUS : 114
BLR : 8
FID : 1 [family name changed for a woman; marriage?]
WLS : 1
The table shows clearly that that most of the new FIDE players were from the two federations -- Russia and Belarus -- which have been restricted by FIDE as a consequence of the war in Ukraine. I looked at the rating records of a handful of those players (ratings.fide.com) and discovered that their games were played in Russia and Belarus.
Of the more than 40.000 players on the 2025 list marked with federation RUS or BLR, about 2% also played games in the period covered by the rating list that I used. I don't know why some players are marked 'FID', but most players aren't. Maybe it has something to do with FOA.
(*) Players under the FIDE Flag (January 2024)