# Youth Soccer Rankings ?



## dawson (Apr 7, 2022)

It's rankings are not perfect but are reasonable .
But it's the only site I know that does a pretty good job of recording games played history for teams.

It's been down for 3 days .
Anyone know if it's coming back ?


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## Larzby (Apr 7, 2022)

dawson said:


> It's rankings are not perfect but are reasonable .
> But it's the only site I know that does a pretty good job of recording games played history for teams.
> 
> It's been down for 3 days .
> Anyone know if it's coming back ?


On another thread, someone said the guy's email is coming back undeliverable.  Doesn't seem like it's coming back !!!


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## dawson (Apr 7, 2022)

I just tried to log on to  "youth soccer rankings .us " and I got " sports engine . com " . I searched the website and found no 
reference to youth soccer rankings . 

That does not look good . It was fun to look up a teams records to get a feel for who you were going to play especially for out of 
state teams . Oh well .


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## RedCard (Apr 7, 2022)

dawson said:


> I just tried to log on to  "youth soccer rankings .us " and I got " sports engine . com " . I searched the website and found no
> reference to youth soccer rankings .
> 
> That does not look good . It was fun to look up a teams records to get a feel for who you were going to play especially for out of
> state teams . Oh well .


There's always the Got Soccer rankings...lol


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## crush (Apr 7, 2022)

RedCard said:


> There's always the Got Soccer rankings...lol


Techs Specs were the best local rankings.  He got good intel and we just wanted the truth and he gave the news straight.  Lot's of hours bro put into it and I super appreciated the rankings ((specs)).


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## Larzby (Apr 8, 2022)

dawson said:


> I just tried to log on to  "youth soccer rankings .us " and I got " sports engine . com " . I searched the website and found no
> reference to youth soccer rankings .
> 
> That does not look good . It was fun to look up a teams records to get a feel for who you were going to play especially for out of
> state teams . Oh well .


It sure was fun to have that resource. Hopefully the guy that ran the site shares his magical algorithm with someone else to take over.


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## dad4 (Apr 8, 2022)

Larzby said:


> It sure was fun to have that resource. Hopefully the guy that ran the site shares his magical algorithm with someone else to take over.


Much of the algorithm was new ranking = average ( opponent ranking + goal differential.)

The harder part is data standardization and all the screen scraping for data gathering.


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## focomoso (Apr 10, 2022)

dad4 said:


> Much of the algorithm was new ranking = average ( opponent ranking + goal differential.)
> 
> The harder part is data standardization and all the screen scraping for data gathering.


It was also weighted by time, but you're right, it's gathering the data that's the pain.


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## JabroniBeater805 (Apr 11, 2022)

There it is. YSR is dead.


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## Carlsbad7 (Apr 11, 2022)

JabroniBeater805 said:


> View attachment 13249
> 
> There it is. YSR is dead.


Interesting that they mention SportsEngine. 

Imagine the amount of information you could realize if you had backend access to SportEngine data.

1. Whos winning + whos losing 
2. Which coaches do better over time
3. Which DOCs do better over time
4. How many practices top teams actually participate in
5. How many tournaments top teams actually participate in

Etc, etc etc. You could even from the opposite and find out which teams / coaches / docs are losing + likely show why.


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## Brav520 (Apr 11, 2022)

How many hours a week do you think YSRs was putting into this?

seems like an opp for someone to step in and build it up and charge a nominal monthly fee for access. I think you would have a good customer base 

similar to what Pomeroy does for college basketball.

is the issue actually getting the data ?


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## Carlsbad7 (Apr 11, 2022)

Brav520 said:


> How many hours a week do you think YSRs was putting into this?
> 
> seems like an opp for someone to step in and build it up and charge a nominal monthly fee for access. I think you would have a good customer base
> 
> ...


Getting the data is always the issue.

This is why I've been saying leagues should have apps that refs run on their phones. After each game refs enter scores / card info / etc. This would be automatically uploaded to whatever website is tracking the scores.

You could even have the app show a pic of each player before the game so refs can confirm whos playing.

So many ways to make Soccer less awful. But then how would the powers that be not be able to bend the rules in their favor.


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## Dargle (Apr 11, 2022)

Carlsbad7 said:


> Getting the data is always the issue.
> 
> This is why I've been saying leagues should have apps that refs run on their phones. After each game refs enter scores / card info / etc. This would be automatically uploaded to whatever website is tracking the scores.
> 
> ...


CSL started this on their app a few years ago, although limited to score and cards.  They had team managers enter the information and then the refs sent in the paper copy as a check on the TMs. It wouldn't take much to add the goals for each player and the photo ID if they haven't already.  MLS Next does it now as did USSDA before them.  DA made it publicly available, but MLS keeps the data internal, at least for now.


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## Carlsbad7 (Apr 11, 2022)

Dargle said:


> CSL started this on their app a few years ago, although limited to score and cards.  They had team managers enter the information and then the refs sent in the paper copy as a check on the TMs. It wouldn't take much to add the goals for each player and the photo ID if they haven't already.  MLS Next does it now as did USSDA before them.  DA made it publicly available, but MLS keeps the data internal, at least for now.


If you know all the players then parents should be able to "prebuy" parking for tournaments + get into the facilities quicker. Just show that you've paid on your phone and get scanned in.

They need to license all the data to 3rd parties + let other businesses that know how to manage data do their thing. 

Soccer groups tend to be greedy, not very knowledgeable, + willing to bend the rules. These things don't mix well with black and white data.


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## espola (Apr 11, 2022)

Carlsbad7 said:


> Interesting that they mention SportsEngine.
> 
> Imagine the amount of information you could realize if you had backend access to SportEngine data.
> 
> ...


"likely show why"?


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## Carlsbad7 (Apr 11, 2022)

espola said:


> "likely show why'?


Should have said "You could even run reports showing the opposite and show why certain teams / coaches / docs are losing".


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## RandomSoccerFan (Apr 13, 2022)

Hi all - I joined this site only because this thread was one of the top results for searching on the web for youthsoccerrankings.us.  I discovered that site not too long ago, but had gotten great use out of it this season for a number of local teams, and was happy to have that background on the teams we would be seeing in both league play and tournament play.  I had traded some messages with the site founder along the way.  After it went down last week, I was surprised to hear that it was actually SportsEngine who both run the site, and who decided to take it down without warning.  They have also decided not to let the site revert back to its prior status, run and maintained (for free), by the founder.  If anyone wants to share how much value they did get out of it, and try and convince SportsEngine to relent - now is the time.  Their contact info is terribly hard to find, but the main contact page is up at:






						Media Toolkit | NBC Sports Next
					

Get access to the NBC Sports Next media toolkit for media assets and press inquiries into our digital applications across youth sports, golf and betting.




					www.sportsengine.com
				




I can confirm that the press@sportsengine.com is still live and reading incoming email, although the woman listed on that page appears to have left SportsEngine as of last month, according to LinkedIn.  help@sportsengine.com is another one that shows up if you try and message them on twitter.  If anyone knows or comes across a better contact - please post up.  I sent an email with my thoughts a little while ago, and perhaps others can do the same.


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## crush (Apr 13, 2022)

Rankings report and top 10 is big time for parents with players under 14.  Someone needs to run with this 100%.  Parents love this stuff and coaches can use rankings to get his or her players excited to play the #2 team out of Texas.


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## rainbow_unicorn (Apr 13, 2022)

Anybody can do a similar ranking to what youthsoccerrankings.us previously did by using the Microsoft Excel Solver add-on and collecting all the data needed.  It's the collection of data that's a pain since you have to scour the web for league and tournament scores across multiple platforms.  Gotsport.com and totalglobalsports.com.  I believe youthsoccerrankings made this easier by writing a program to screen scrape scores from the different sites.  A previous poster had done this for the 05's and I had done this for the 09's (the Excel solver portion only...manually collected the scores).  This is a labor of love and I can understand why the youthsoccerrankings owner let it go after a while if they had kids age out.  There is a lot of inconsistencies in way teams show up on different sites (or different tournaments within the same site) and I'm sure youthsoccerrankings was flooded with correction requests like "my daughters team actually won 5-0 instead of 1-0...you have to fix this!"  You take for granted what you have until one day it's gone.


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## Dominic (Apr 13, 2022)

If anyone wants to use SoCalSoccer.com dedicated server for hosting and creating a rankings site let me know.


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## espola (Apr 13, 2022)

Dominic said:


> If anyone wants to use SoCalSoccer.com dedicated server for hosting and creating a rankings site let me know.


I tried something like this back when my kids were playing and it was just becoming possible to get tournament scores and league standings online.  I never went further than preparing a sketch of our upcoming opponents for my kids' coaches.  I got the feeling they didn't know what to do with the information.  I lost interest after a time, but the online data is much richer now and all it would take is someone willing to put in the time and skillful in net programming.


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## crush (Apr 13, 2022)

Dominic said:


> If anyone wants to use SoCalSoccer.com dedicated server for hosting and creating a rankings site let me know.


@Technician72, do I hear a calling and maybe a business opportunity?  I can handle sales & marketing if you or someone will run the back office.  I came hear for two reasons @Dominic when my girl was 9.  First reason, I heard some dads were talking smack about my little #7 and her combo team from Legends North and Legends Temecula.  My first day here some dad was making fun of #7 because she cried all the time and got the refs on her side, especially in the box and in close games, PK will win it   She was the smallest on the field but had one of the bigger competitive hearts.  Second, I heard about the rankings.  I only stayed in my lane back then, the U9 thread.  I was pissed off and shocked that grown men would make fun of my dd for crying.  I never went off topic and I never read about any olders or college or politics.  Things are a little nicer regarding making fun of other people's kids except for you know who.  I'm for free speech Dom so whatever.  Thanks for all the great times.  You need rankings big time bro, moo


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## Dominic (Apr 13, 2022)

We have a Cpanel backend that is easy to use with many installed programs.


1. BLUES
2. SURF
3. SLAMMERS
4. So Cal United
5. Samba
6. AV Heat 
7. LA Premiere
8. Celtic
9. Santa Clarita United


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## crush (Apr 13, 2022)

Dominic said:


> We have a Cpanel backend that is easy to use with many installed programs.
> 
> 
> 1. BLUES
> ...


No Beach?  Legends?  That Cpanel is old bro.


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## Dominic (Apr 13, 2022)

I went way back with some of those names.


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## crush (Apr 13, 2022)

Dominic said:


> I went way back with some of those names.


I hear those were some great times.  My wife's father coached a team in Walnut/Diamond Bar in early 80s.  Santos FC or something like that.  Hard core soccer Dom.  I tell Grandpa about the parents in 2022 and he laughs.  He told me he might have one or two dads looking for extra edge outside of what their boy did on the field.  He told me he had one parent meeting before the first practice to tell the parents the rules.  His biggest rule was play time complaining.  He nipped that in the butt at first meeting.  He told the parents in his way that if you want play time, go to AYSO.  He's the coach and he plays to win first, no ifs and or butts.  Plus, it's his way or the highway regarding where he plays your kid.  If you dont like it, go to another team before our first practice or go to A-SO.  The other time he talked to parents was at the team banquet after the season was over.  He was in high demand but he came with high demands.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Apr 14, 2022)

As mentioned a few times above - I agree, calculating the ratings/scores and having it readable to interpret relative team strength is not terribly complicated once someone has the data.  Sure - there are weighting options on how much to value newer games vs. older games, minimum number of games to be included as a team, and a few more, but that's all tweakable.  Getting the data from gotsport/gotsoccer/all the random tournament sites, within a few days of it being posted up, is the secret sauce to anything like this at scale.  But even that isn't necessarily is technically complicated as one might think at first glance.  There is a ton of software available to handle the data acquisition by screen scraping websites, and get it into a usable data format.  Check out lists like this.  Once configured, it likely only requires tweaking for a site once someone screams that it's not working.  Then the other issue is as also been described above, how to represent that this team is actually this team across platforms where they are described differently.  youthsoccerrankings had put together a pretty good system for that, where anyone could both merge teams that were the same programmatically, and could also report where a team's data was being shown incorrectly, by removing a data source.  We only saw the front end, and not necessarily how it was handled on the backend, but it appeared that much of it was automated - and not just sending a message to a person via email for them to fix manually.  That allows it to scale to thousands and thousands of teams, and eventually millions of games.  Yes - that does allow for data pollution as people might unintentionally (or even intentionally) miscategorize teams, or add/remove incorrect data sources - but you can deal with it only when someone screams, rather than be in the middle of every transaction.


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## timmyh (Apr 14, 2022)

I dont know why, say, soccer.com doesn't recreate this and use it as a tool to get tens of thousands of over-invested parents perusing their site on a weekly basis. 

Wouldn't think it would take all that many extra cleat sales to pay for it and then some. 

Or why doesn't Academy or Dicks Sporting Goods do this for every youth sport for the same reasons? 

(soccer.com, you are welcome and please send future commissions to timmyh)


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## espola (Apr 14, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> As mentioned a few times above - I agree, calculating the ratings/scores and having it readable to interpret relative team strength is not terribly complicated once someone has the data.  Sure - there are weighting options on how much to value newer games vs. older games, minimum number of games to be included as a team, and a few more, but that's all tweakable.  Getting the data from gotsport/gotsoccer/all the random tournament sites, within a few days of it being posted up, is the secret sauce to anything like this at scale.  But even that isn't necessarily is technically complicated as one might think at first glance.  There is a ton of software available to handle the data acquisition by screen scraping websites, and get it into a usable data format.  Check out lists like this.  Once configured, it likely only requires tweaking for a site once someone screams that it's not working.  Then the other issue is as also been described above, how to represent that this team is actually this team across platforms where they are described differently.  youthsoccerrankings had put together a pretty good system for that, where anyone could both merge teams that were the same programmatically, and could also report where a team's data was being shown incorrectly, by removing a data source.  We only saw the front end, and not necessarily how it was handled on the backend, but it appeared that much of it was automated - and not just sending a message to a person via email for them to fix manually.  That allows it to scale to thousands and thousands of teams, and eventually millions of games.  Yes - that does allow for data pollution as people might unintentionally (or even intentionally) miscategorize teams, or add/remove incorrect data sources - but you can deal with it only when someone screams, rather than be in the middle of every transaction.


The most complete, honest, and thorough rating system is probably the NCAA RPI rating system for men's and women's soccer.  But even that thas its critics.  That would be a good model to work from.


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## dad4 (Apr 14, 2022)

espola said:


> The most complete, honest, and thorough rating system is probably the NCAA RPI rating system for men's and women's soccer.  But even that thas its critics.  That would be a good model to work from.


RPI is a weighted sum of win percentages for you, your opponents, and their opponents.  (WP + 2x OWP + OOWP)/4

This makes sense in a college context, where schools control their own schedules, and some prefer to load up on lightweights.  The punching bag teams end up with low win percentages, so you drag down your RPI if you put them on your schedule.

Not so great for youth sports.  What happens when you move up a flight or play up a year?  Your win percentage drops.  But the win percentage of your opponents is about the same: the U13 bracket has no more and no fewer total wins than the U14 bracket.

So, WP falls, but the other two components stay level.  Your RPI will fall significantly every time you move up, and rise significantly every time you move down.


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## espola (Apr 14, 2022)

dad4 said:


> RPI is a weighted sum of win percentages for you, your opponents, and their opponents.  (WP + 2x OWP + OOWP)/4
> 
> This makes sense in a college context, where schools control their own schedules, and some prefer to load up on lightweights.  The punching bag teams end up with low win percentages, so you drag down your RPI if you put them on your schedule.
> 
> ...


One of the common myths of the RPI system is that some schools load their schedule with opponents they believe will have a winning record so even if they lose they will get a bump in the RPI.  If you follow the math through, it's pretty much a wash.  The component of RPI that this your own win-loss record has only about 20 factors, while the oppoents' win/loss record has about 20x20 or about 400 factors.  Over a season's schedule it tends toward .500 anyway.  The OOWP has even a weaker result.  The worst thing that can happen to a school's RPI is to lose to a "weaker" opponent.

Where some schools get an advantage is if they play in a conference that has a good WTL record against non-conference opponents.  That bumps up the points they get from their conference games.

And after that mathematicians have had their say at the end of the season, the NCAA throws in a few adjustments, things like losing at home to team in the bottom of the RPI rankings (negative) or winning on the road to a team with a strong RPI ranking (positive).  

For a fuller examination of this issue, read gauchodan's posts on bigsoccer.com "College and amateur soccer" pagre.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Apr 14, 2022)

timmyh said:


> I dont know why, say, soccer.com doesn't recreate this and use it as a tool to get tens of thousands of over-invested parents perusing their site on a weekly basis.


The question I had when I first found youthsoccerrankings, was why doesn't gotsoccer/gotsport implement similar functionality.  The rankings on gotsoccer/gotsport are essentially pointless and unusable - yet that same data pulled into youthsoccerrankings gave actionable information.  In that vein, I wonder if one of the reasons for the shutdown was more legal in nature - gotsoccer/gotsport got tired of their site data being duplicated elsewhere, and on the main page of the site it had a graph literally showing how much better quality the rankings were in predicting a winner.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Apr 14, 2022)

web.archive.org lets us go back and see things like this:  



The archive is showing something from 2021.  If I remember correctly, the predictive power was still about the same - but the game coverage was much better before it went dark, something like 70% coverage for YSR, and 40% for Gotsoccer.


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## dad4 (Apr 14, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> The question I had when I first found youthsoccerrankings, was why doesn't gotsoccer/gotsport implement similar functionality.  The rankings on gotsoccer/gotsport are essentially pointless and unusable - yet that same data pulled into youthsoccerrankings gave actionable information.  In that vein, I wonder if one of the reasons for the shutdown was more legal in nature - gotsoccer/gotsport got tired of their site data being duplicated elsewhere, and on the main page of the site it had a graph literally showing how much better quality the rankings were in predicting a winner.


I still don't understand why got soccer uses such a bad algorithm.  Any decent database team could implement a public domain ranking algorithm in a few weeks.  

Instead, they publish a trash ranking and put their name on it.  All it does is weaken the got soccer brand.


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## Woodwork (Apr 14, 2022)

So whoever was first when the rankings stopped won, right?


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## Brav520 (Apr 14, 2022)

I’d rather soccer.com focus on logistics and supply chain management 

or maybe we are all just spoiled by Amazon


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## dawson (Apr 14, 2022)

dad4 said:


> I still don't understand why got soccer uses such a bad algorithm.  Any decent database team could implement a public domain ranking algorithm in a few weeks.
> 
> Instead, they publish a trash ranking and put their name on it.  All it does is weaken the got soccer brand.


Rankings are nice and I think that YSR rankings follow a logical formula and are reasonable.

However , I think just as important is 
the recording of game history for so many 
teams covering so many different leagues , EA  , MLS next , ECNL , NPL , ECRL and most tournaments, and leagues across the nation .

There are a multitude of uses that a record of a teams history helps fulfill. To name a few :
Plain old entertainment.
Coaches , parents, players can get an idea of how strong an upcoming opponent and over a number of games can get a feeling for whether their team is improving.
Choosing a new team .
Choosing a new coach.
Choosing a tournament.
Teams setting goals .

Although , I’m not  saying choosing a
Coach, team or a club should be  based only on their historical win loss record but it should be one of the factors to consider .

I’d be happy with just the historical records
of as many teams as possible across the nation. Which YSR covered significantly better then Got Soccer or any other similar organization.  And since the software of YSR probably still exists where so many links to team games are already established I would hope somehow , someone will take it over and perhaps solicit ads and or charge a small fee to make it worth while and cover costs such as this forum does .


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## crush (Apr 15, 2022)

If I was tasked with coming up with a new rankings site, I would start with a top 10 in Socal and NoCal for all the ages.  I dont really care about all the other States.  Texas will have a team or two that will want to travel to California to take on the best.  If you build it, they will travel here, not the other way around.


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## Nfarr67291 (Apr 15, 2022)

Below is the email I received from Mark who ran the site. 




> The official word... "Thank you for your interest. The Youth Soccer Rankings site is no longer in service. For the latest news in the youth soccer community we encourage you to visit Soccer Wire and for information about soccer programs in your area please visit SportsEngine. "
> 
> Unofficially, I don't know why SportsEngine shut the site down. It was a big surprise to me. They didn’t give a reason, but I guess they are cost cutting. I offered to take back ownership of the site and run it for free again, but they are unwilling to support that either, even though they no longer plan to use it. Sadly, this looks like the end of the road.
> 
> ...


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## dawson (Apr 15, 2022)

Nfarr67291 said:


> Below is the email I received from Mark who ran the site.


Maybe someone could start one of those online petitions .

Evidently from the above post it would be directed to Sports Engine . If Mark is willing to take it back there’s a path to making it work and most businesses will respond to public pressure if its strong enough. 

And I fail to see how if Mark used ads and a small fee to users it would not cover any costs involved. Heck a lot of tournaments use YSR because its easy to use to do seeding and is more accurate then any other rankings system. So maybe with some awareness they would help with paying a small reasonable fee I really don’t see any other seeding system that is as accurate and fair as YSR .

And if he has time maybe Dominic could give some direction on how to secure ads and setup fees . He’s certainly done a great job with the forum he runs . ( of course I don’t know Dominic and maybe he just doesn’t have the time which would certainly be understandable ! )

Just some thoughts .


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## timbuck (Apr 15, 2022)

My guess is that with all of the new leagues and different scheduling programs and formats out there that it became too crazy to try and manage.  I can't imagine whoever was running it was making much money off of it.  When it was just ecnl, da and local leagues+gotsoccer+tcg-  things were probably somewhat simple to program and was probably run as a fun hobby.
Now you need engineers from Apple to try and program an algorithm to scrape all of the various sites and give weight to which league means "Better".


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## Carlsbad7 (Apr 15, 2022)

timbuck said:


> My guess is that with all of the new leagues and different scheduling programs and formats out there that it became too crazy to try and manage.  I can't imagine whoever was running it was making much money off of it.  When it was just ecnl, da and local leagues+gotsoccer+tcg-  things were probably somewhat simple to program and was probably run as a fun hobby.
> Now you need engineers from Apple to try and program an algorithm to scrape all of the various sites and give weight to which league means "Better".


This is why I stated earlier in this thread that getting the data is always the hardest part + the processes are constantly changing/evolving.

Processing + presenting data is hard as well but you only have to do it once.


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## rainbow_unicorn (Apr 15, 2022)

I pulled up my old Excel template with Solver add-on and threw in a thousand G09 ECNL games from this season.  Took about 3 hours and the time consuming part was pulling ECNL results -> JSON -> CSV.  I then realized that team names were different between regular season and showcase results which required more manual fixing.  But wanted to show that it's possible.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Apr 15, 2022)

dawson said:


> I’d be happy with just the historical records
> of as many teams as possible across the nation. Which YSR covered significantly better then Got Soccer or any other similar organization.  And since the software of YSR probably still exists where so many links to team games are already established I would hope somehow , someone will take it over and perhaps solicit ads and or charge a small fee to make it worth while and cover costs such as this forum does .


Right - but per Mark's email (sent same one to me; odds are he's had to send it to a number of folks who got in touch with him), SportsEngine has no intention of bringing it back up, selling the rights/software, or even just giving it back to him to let him continue to run it without any of their $ or involvement.  It's dead unless they change their mind - and that is only possible if enough people contacting them are able to convince SportsEngine that it's the right move to support youth soccer in general.  Of course it's possible for someone to start from scratch and build up something similar - but that may be even less likely to happen, than starting with the existing YSR base that was tweaked over many years.


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## Dominic (Apr 15, 2022)

rainbow_unicorn said:


> I pulled up my old Excel template with Solver add-on and threw in a thousand G09 ECNL games from this season.  Took about 3 hours and the time consuming part was pulling ECNL results -> JSON -> CSV.  I then realized that team names were different between regular season and showcase results which required more manual fixing.  But wanted to show that it's possible.
> 
> View attachment 13284


This is great info , thanks for sharing.


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## Nfarr67291 (Apr 15, 2022)

The domain is registered to NBC and they definitely have money to keep it up.


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## dad4 (Apr 15, 2022)

Nfarr67291 said:


> The domain is registered to NBC and they definitely have money to keep it up.


The real question is who has the energy to write a decent screen scraper to get the data.


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## TeamDadJokes (Apr 16, 2022)

There’s these websites where you can write a general statement and then you can create a link with that template that automatically emails with that signees information to whoever you want to petition. Is there any way we can do something like that? If so, where do we send that to?


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## youthsoccerrankings (Apr 19, 2022)

I'm considering running with this. I enjoyed the site as much as anyone. Thank you Mark! As a tennis player I enjoy Universal Tennis Rating which is similar but it can be user inputted as well. I wonder if there was a way to this like a Wiki-like of Score-Posting Forum was done by teams themselves and data was then organized and than contested or verified. The scraping is the magic sauce but garbage in garbage out. One of my kids teams had 3 different teams in YSR and another team for my daughter missed half the games results.  If there was a way for user input it would solve some of the issues. Clearly motivated parents would be needed to submit results.  
I agree to start with CAS is the best way.  Please hit me up if you have any positive input.


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## SoccerFan4Life (Apr 19, 2022)

youthsoccerrankings said:


> I'm considering running with this. I enjoyed the site as much as anyone. Thank you Mark! As a tennis player I enjoy Universal Tennis Rating which is similar but it can be user inputted as well. I wonder if there was a way to this like a Wiki-like of Score-Posting Forum was done by teams themselves and data was then organized and than contested or verified. The scraping is the magic sauce but garbage in garbage out. One of my kids teams had 3 different teams in YSR and another team for my daughter missed half the games results.  If there was a way for user input it would solve some of the issues. Clearly motivated parents would be needed to submit results.
> I agree to start with CAS is the best way.  Please hit me up if you have any positive input.


You would be surprise how many people would be willing to pay $10 to $20 a year to have access to this information.


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## Brav520 (Apr 19, 2022)

SoccerFan4Life said:


> You would be surprise how many people would be willing to pay $10 to $20 a year to have access to this information.


Absolutely


----------



## crush (Apr 19, 2022)

youthsoccerrankings said:


> I'm considering running with this. I enjoyed the site as much as anyone. Thank you Mark! As a tennis player I enjoy Universal Tennis Rating which is similar but it can be user inputted as well. I wonder if there was a way to this like a Wiki-like of Score-Posting Forum was done by teams themselves and data was then organized and than contested or verified. The scraping is the magic sauce but garbage in garbage out. One of my kids teams had 3 different teams in YSR and another team for my daughter missed half the games results.  If there was a way for user input it would solve some of the issues. Clearly motivated parents would be needed to submit results.
> I agree to start with CAS is the best way.  Please hit me up if you have any positive input.


Great stuff and it's a winner.  I would have paid $4.95 a month for access.


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## Larzby (Apr 19, 2022)

youthsoccerrankings said:


> I'm considering running with this. I enjoyed the site as much as anyone. Thank you Mark! As a tennis player I enjoy Universal Tennis Rating which is similar but it can be user inputted as well. I wonder if there was a way to this like a Wiki-like of Score-Posting Forum was done by teams themselves and data was then organized and than contested or verified. The scraping is the magic sauce but garbage in garbage out. One of my kids teams had 3 different teams in YSR and another team for my daughter missed half the games results.  If there was a way for user input it would solve some of the issues. Clearly motivated parents would be needed to submit results.
> I agree to start with CAS is the best way.  Please hit me up if you have any positive input.


This is brilliant, glad you thought of it.  The fact is that among the top teams, it seems like there's always a parent willing to send in scores or corrections.  Down in the 100+ range (and I guess maybe even for 50+) you'll likely get garbage in/garbage out for many teams, but if they don't care about an inaccurate rating for their team, why should anyone else?  Obviously, perfection is the goal, but I'd say for most of the fanatics (yours truly included) the Top 100-ish being accurate would be fine


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## socalkdg (Apr 20, 2022)

If you can grab data easily, use the system to create 3 things, youth soccer rankings, High School soccer rankings, and college soccer rankings. Might as well offer all three thus getting more people accessing the site. For males and females. Youth soccer went back 1.5 years, which is too long for results.   I'd make it 1 year of date. You could also make it user choice and allow them to choose 3 months, 6 months, a year, etc. Lastly I'd limit the max a score difference could be and consider shutouts when considering the ranking. A 2-0 win is just as valuable as a 4-1 win, maybe more.


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## Carlsbad7 (Apr 20, 2022)

A wiki for parents to input scores is a great idea.

If data is in a normalized format it would be easy to run reports + rank teams


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## Venantsyo (Apr 20, 2022)

Why not use something akin to the Uefa Club Rankings? https://kassiesa.net/uefa/calc.html#details


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## espola (Apr 20, 2022)

socalkdg said:


> If you can grab data easily, use the system to create 3 things, youth soccer rankings, High School soccer rankings, and college soccer rankings. Might as well offer all three thus getting more people accessing the site. For males and females. Youth soccer went back 1.5 years, which is too long for results.   I'd make it 1 year of date. You could also make it user choice and allow them to choose 3 months, 6 months, a year, etc. Lastly I'd limit the max a score difference could be and consider shutouts when considering the ranking. A 2-0 win is just as valuable as a 4-1 win, maybe more.


Maxpreps already does a fairly good job of ranking high school teams, although their national rankings should be taken with a grain of salt due to the lack of interstate competition.


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## Cafu (Apr 21, 2022)

He was forced to take site down because of the MLS. They didn’t want people to know that some of their teams are not as good as others who play in different leagues.


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## Brav520 (Apr 21, 2022)

Cafu said:


> He was forced to take site down because of the MLS. They didn’t want people to know that some of their teams are not as good as others who play in different leagues.


so like a cease &desist?

so, you a private citizen arent allowed to rank teams?


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## dad4 (Apr 25, 2022)

Brav520 said:


> so like a cease &desist?
> 
> so, you a private citizen arent allowed to rank teams?


Probably more along the lines of NBC, a corporate entity, is not allowed to republish GotSoccer data.


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## SoccerFan4Life (Apr 25, 2022)

Cafu said:


> He was forced to take site down because of the MLS. They didn’t want people to know that some of their teams are not as good as others who play in different leagues.


The YSR owner should just call it Fantasy Ranking Youth Soccer site.   Thousands of sites publish fantasy leagues and they dont get in trouble.     I dont see how MLS can shutdown a youth ranking site while so many other sports rankings exist all over


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## youthsoccerrankings (Apr 26, 2022)

MLS Clubs and Big Clubs are major ad sponsors of Sports Engine and didn't like all the data getting released. Whether the results, lack of matches or lack of tournament play does not help 'Big Brands' when you charge 3K for 18 league matches and 3 tournaments a year.  YSR was doing nothing illegal.


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## Jaxeat4 (Apr 27, 2022)

Ok guys then let's just ALL send emails to sportsengine begging them to allow the site to continue to be run. If they get like over a hundred emails they'll HAVE to do something


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## youthsoccerrankings (Apr 28, 2022)

My web developers have begun and I will push this is CAS this summer and see if it can take off and be a productive resource.  Please see below and share feedback to this post directly.  Thank you!

Universal Soccer Rankings

Universal Soccer Rankings is for the soccer community by the soccer community. USR is intended to produce an objective, consistent, and accurate predictive match result between two soccer teams regardless of age, gender, nationality, or locale of a given match. USR is free. Register your team and scores today on universalsoccerrankings.com.

FAQ:
How are teams ranked?
Rankings Formula: Current Ranking = (Team Ranking + Opponent Ranking + Goal Differential) / 2

How do I add our team and results?
Adding a team is free. Please be as detailed as possible and make sure not to add duplicate teams. Click here to add.

Do friendlies or scrimmages count?
No.  Only league and tournament matches count.

How do I contact USR?
Email us at supportX@universalsoccerrankings.com

How do I remove a team?
Teams and results are public record. We will do our best to verify any contested team info and contested match results.

Why does my team’s rankings seem inaccurate?
Each team needs about 10 results to be given an accurate ranking.

How many games and tournaments do teams play?
Per year club soccer teams play 12-32 league matches and 6 - 50 tournament matches.


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## Larzby (Apr 28, 2022)

youthsoccerrankings said:


> My web developers have begun and I will push this is CAS this summer and see if it can take off and be a productive resource.  Please see below and share feedback to this post directly.  Thank you!
> 
> Universal Soccer Rankings
> 
> ...


Wow, this is great. If I can help, let me know, but unfortunately I'm not a software person.


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## gstahl (Apr 28, 2022)

A couple of notes: a system/screen scrapper would be needed to make this work.  As soon as you have parents' input scores, you get omissions and inaccuracies... Did not like the ref, do not input the score, did not bring your top players, do not input the score, leave the score of the finals out, split your team into two depending on event and league play... all these little items that might seem "fair" and "reasonable" will make the ratings non-sense.  To get the absolute best ratings, there needs to be a system that ingests scores as reliably as possible and thoroughly as possible.

The idea of looking at different amounts of history is interesting, rankings for the last six months, the previous year, etc.  I would not do three months as you really need 10+ games for the system to settle, and with more pools of teams with no common games, the lass national rankings make any sense.

Hats off to folks willing to go after this; it was a valuable tool to get an idea about unknown opponents.  I wonder, in the end, if this was an acquisition to shutdown; pretty crappy move if it was.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Apr 29, 2022)

Applaud the effort - but I agree with gstahl.  It's like pulling teeth sometimes to get scores entered correctly once into the official systems.  Expecting them to be entered twice into a separate system to support a new ranking site is exceedingly optimistic in my view.  YSR was useful because it incorporated millions of games.  GotSoccer/GotSport is useful because many leagues have to enter the information there already - so the data is full/rich.  Even accounting for rabid parent soccer fans - I don't see how an optional self-entry site ever gets over the hump of continuous accurate data input to the extent it would be useful for 1 random team to check on another random team in the country.  2 cents:  Build the infrastructure, and then look into those automated screen scraping tools listed earlier.  It's not an impossible task, and will result in a much more valuable resource.


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## Carlsbad7 (Apr 29, 2022)

The trick to getting parents to enter scores correctly + all the time is to incentive them.

Give platinum level monthly access to this site for those that enter 10 scores a month into the scores wiki.

If they enter data incorrectly others will correct them.

Giving out a few platinum level subscriptions to this site wouldn't be a big deal if it drove even more traffic to compensate.


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## crush (Apr 29, 2022)

My two cents.  You need help from the eyes that watch besides the scores.  When @Technician72 did his Tech Spec Rankings for Socal only, ((which meant the #1 team in the country back in the day)) he asked all of us to share our insights on what players had switched clubs, scores, who was guesting, who had combo teams and who was playing the best soccer at the time.  Surf Cup was important as was to gather favor points, plus Cal South tournament.  If you made it out of group play, you got lot's of love from all the parents.  Surf Cup champ was crowned #1and the loser was #2 in the State. The rest debated #3-#10 in the Cal South soccer mecca.  The parents have to be the driving force because they see the games and report what they see.  Once you gather all this information, you run with it and do a top 10.


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## Dargle (May 2, 2022)

Here's a link to a site that appears to be planning to try to fill the gap left by the demise of youthsoccerrankings



			Welcome to How's That Team?


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## NoSouppForYou (Jun 18, 2022)

New ranking site up: Upper90rankings.com

Looks to be starting with ECNL with aspirations to include all leagues and tournaments in the fall.


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## Larzby (Jun 18, 2022)

NoSouppForYou said:


> New ranking site up: Upper90rankings.com
> 
> Looks to be starting with ECNL with aspirations to include all leagues and tournaments in the fall.View attachment 13955


OMG, I'm almost afraid to look!  It's been rough these past few weeks without rankings


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## paytoplayisgood (Jun 18, 2022)

Larzby said:


> OMG, I'm almost afraid to look!  It's been rough these past few weeks without rankings


grow up. you don't need some website to compare teams of 10 year old girls. It aint that big of a deal bud.


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## tjinaz (Jul 30, 2022)

Larzby said:


> OMG, I'm almost afraid to look!  It's been rough these past few weeks without rankings


I loved YSR.  When you do tournaments or play out of state how are you supposed to have any idea the quality of the team you are playing against?  I think tons of tournament schedulers used it to rank brackets so the competition is good and not blowouts.  How else are they supposed to know without the clearing house of information that was in YSR.


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## youthsoccerrankings (Aug 10, 2022)

Update:  Each team will start with Age Group Starting Ranking and move up and down from there.

AgeStarting Rankings201310u-10201214u11201118u12201022u13200924u14200828u15200732u16200634u17200538u18200442u19


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## tjinaz (Aug 11, 2022)

youthsoccerrankings said:


> Update:  Each team will start with Age Group Starting Ranking and move up and down from there.
> 
> AgeStarting Rankings201310u-10201214u11201118u12201022u13200924u14200828u15200732u16200634u17200538u18200442u19


That is upper 90?  I don't see an update their since May


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## dad4 (Aug 11, 2022)

tjinaz said:


> That is upper 90?  I don't see an update their since May


I think upper 90 and universal soccer rankings are two different groups.

Best of luck to them both.


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## VanMan (Aug 11, 2022)

dad4 said:


> I think upper 90 and universal soccer rankings are two different groups.
> 
> Best of luck to them both.


Both look dead at this point.  Too bad.


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## MARsSPEED (Aug 23, 2022)

Hello -

Since the youthsoccerrankings.us website was shut down at the end of March, I have been working long hours to create a new and improved system that runs as an app on your phone or tablet. Please check it out by searching for "Soccer Rankings" on either the Apple App Store or (in a few days) the Google Play Store.

In this first release you can view rankings for all teams from U10 to U19, view results, see game result predictions and correct errors in the team entry or playing record. I hope you will help me to get the data as accurate as possible. Some improvements you will see over the old system.

* More results.
* State rankings based on geographical state (e.g. CA, NY, OH, PA, TX)
* Better automation of merging results from different websites.
* Instant update to the rankings if you make corrections.
* Score prediction and win probability for any pair of teams.
* More predictive ranking algorithm.
* Secure tracking of who makes changes so we can block user's editing rights if they make careless or deliberate errors.

The next release will include bug fixes plus club rankings.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would spread the word about the new app in your soccer community. Hopefully we can get this into the hands of competition organizers and improve the experience of traveling teams across the country.

Please let me know if you see any issues or have any ideas for improvements.

New contact information: support@usasportstatistics.net

Kind regards,

Mark


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## MARsSPEED (Aug 23, 2022)

I am not Mark, lol. Just spreading the good word.


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## Woodwork (Aug 23, 2022)

MARsSPEED said:


> Hello -
> 
> Since the youthsoccerrankings.us website was shut down at the end of March, I have been working long hours to create a new and improved system that runs as an app on your phone or tablet. Please check it out by searching for "Soccer Rankings" on either the Apple App Store or (in a few days) the Google Play Store.
> 
> ...


Should be its own thread and stickied.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Aug 23, 2022)

Freaking awesome.  Way to go Mark.  Hoping for a full-fledged web interface to it at some point, dealing with too much data at once just isn't fun in a limited app context on a small screen - but the accuracy and value of the data is most important.  I am OK with the idea of free vs. paid features, and the $10 yearly is a a deal - with the hope that there is enough revenue to keep Mark interested in building/growing/maintaining it over time.


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## Woodwork (Aug 23, 2022)

From an SEO perspective, we should all do our part not to backlink to that other site any longer.  We should link to the app store download https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soccer-rankings/id1638526916 instead for youth club soccer rankings, including state specific rankings like California, Arizona, Texas, Utah, New York, and Florida, but also access to club soccer game history to see not only which teams are the best on average, but also head to head competition.

Also rate the app when you download!


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## Futbol Dad (Aug 23, 2022)

MARsSPEED said:


> Hello -
> 
> Since the youthsoccerrankings.us website was shut down at the end of March, I have been working long hours to create a new and improved system that runs as an app on your phone or tablet. Please check it out by searching for "Soccer Rankings" on either the Apple App Store or (in a few days) the Google Play Store.
> 
> ...


Downloaded the app and told multiple people already! Looks clean and easy to use!
1 question so far, do I only get to see the teams results if I pay for the “pro” version?
Thank you for putting in the time and effort to bring this to us


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## MARsSPEED (Aug 23, 2022)

Futbol Dad said:


> Downloaded the app and told multiple people already! Looks clean and easy to use!
> 1 question so far, do I only get to see the teams results if I pay for the “pro” version?
> Thank you for putting in the time and effort to bring this to us


Not Mark, I just wanted to spread the word. I also think it deserves its own thread. I hope everyone puts up the $10 for him too since we all enjoyed his old site.


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## NorCalDad (Aug 23, 2022)

This is great!


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## Surf Zombie (Aug 23, 2022)

Woodwork said:


> From an SEO perspective, we should all do our part not to backlink to that other site any longer.  We should link to the app store download https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soccer-rankings/id1638526916 instead for youth club soccer rankings, including state specific rankings like California, Arizona, Texas, Utah, New York, and Florida, but also access to club soccer game history to see not only which teams are the best on average, but also head to head competition.
> 
> Also rate the app when you download!


I just spent the $10. It’s very cool.


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## dad4 (Aug 23, 2022)

The $10 also gets you better data on each team, like the numeric score and their record in recent games.

Good info to have if you're setting up scrimmages.  If you're a 49 and they are a 50, it's probably a decent game.  If you are 47 and they are 52, you each need a different opponent.


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## LongBall (Aug 23, 2022)

Top teams per age...
05 -  Real Colorado (51.12)
06 -  SLSG (50.69)
07 -  Solar (51.41)
08 -  Nationals (49.56) 
09 -  Solar (46.47)
10 -  Surf (44.14)
11 -  Blues (42.46)
12 -  Surf (40.43)
13 -  Blues (36.00)


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## Woodwork (Aug 24, 2022)

LongBall said:


> Top teams per age...
> 05 -  Real Colorado (51.12)
> 06 -  SLSG (50.69)
> 07 -  Solar (51.41)
> ...


The best age is 15.  Suck it 16!


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## CaliLuv (Aug 25, 2022)

LongBall said:


> Top teams per age...
> 05 -  Real Colorado (51.12)
> 06 -  SLSG (50.69)
> 07 -  Solar (51.41)
> ...


So Solar 07 is the best team in the country, per the rankings.  But I'm told they lost two YNT camp-level players (one went to IMG, and another was cut for attitude reasons and is now playing Legends this fall...that will fill a big hole on that 07 Legends team).  Solar won't be quite as good as in the past.


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## myself (Aug 25, 2022)

CaliLuv said:


> So Solar 07 is the best team in the country, per the rankings.  But I'm told they lost two YNT camp-level players (one went to IMG, and another was cut for attitude reasons and is now playing Legends this fall...that will fill a big hole on that 07 Legends team).  Solar won't be quite as good as in the past.


Texas is pretty far from California isn't it? They moved? To play for Legends??


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## diamondcoach (Aug 25, 2022)

The ‘05 HB Koge team is ranked 40th? How?


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## rainbow_unicorn (Aug 25, 2022)

Sounds like these rankings are not very accurate.  I see some third teams ranked higher than the same club's first team.


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## Woodwork (Aug 25, 2022)

CaliLuv said:


> So Solar 07 is the best team in the country, per the rankings.  But I'm told they lost two YNT camp-level players (one went to IMG, and another was cut for attitude reasons and is now playing Legends this fall...that will fill a big hole on that 07 Legends team).  Solar won't be quite as good as in the past.


If you are an 05 team looking to win and get noticed, fill your roster with 07s.  That's my takeaway.


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## focomoso (Aug 25, 2022)

Any word on the android version? There's something called "Soccer Ranking" in the google play store, but it looks sketchy.


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## golazo7 (Aug 27, 2022)

Very appreciate if the hard work done to make this happen 

Apologies if this has been discussed before:

Insight on how these rankings are made, Elo?,does It account for teams playing up, etc?


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## Brav520 (Aug 27, 2022)

Question

How secure is our payment information

As an Apple user , it’s that information stored with Apple , and they handle the payments for a fee to the app owner ?

btw this looks great , appreciate the work on this


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## RandomSoccerFan (Aug 28, 2022)

Remember, to my knowledge, Mark isn't on this site at all.  This info just got posted to this forum because people here were using and interested in youthsoccerrankings.com prior.  Any direct questions about this new app should probably be addressed right to him at:  support@usasportstatistics.net



focomoso said:


> Any word on the android version? There's something called "Soccer Ranking" in the google play store, but it looks sketchy.


Right - that doesn't look like this app yet.  In his email blast, he said Android was coming soon, but no idea whether that's days/weeks.  I likely want to move over to the Android version and let the Apple version lapse if it comes out before the free trial runs out - but not a big deal either way.  It's a simple app, the data is what's most important.



golazo7 said:


> Very appreciate if the hard work done to make this happen
> 
> Apologies if this has been discussed before:
> 
> Insight on how these rankings are made, Elo?,does It account for teams playing up, etc?


It sounds like it's using a similar setup to the YSL rankings.  Teams get defined, then there is a process to grab data from a host of different scoring/tournament back ends (gotsoccer/gotsport/etc) for game info.  That game info gets automatically pushed to a team, and there is a bunch of backend data normalization to try and make sure that the right data gets to the right team.  There is plenty of room for data corruption here, as teams enter their names differently in various tournaments, teams themselves swap players and lineups over time, and a host of other reasons.  But - for each team, there is a list of sources clearly defined at the bottom of the team data, so if it has pulled in incorrect data, the team can have that particular source deleted from their record.  And similarly - if data hasn't been loaded to their team, they can search for that data that may have been pulled into the system, and have it assigned to the team.  In the past, with YSL - anyone could submit corrections for any team, with no login or other requirements.  I'm surprised there wasn't more pollution of the data with people messing with it, but I hadn't really seen that with all the teams I had been following, at least.  With this new app - you can make the same requests to add data/delete data, but it's now at least tied to an account, that Mark may have an easier time validating whether someone is making updates in good faith or not.

Now in terms of the ratings themselves, it's as simple as goal difference by game.  If a team is ranked 42, and they are playing a team ranked 40, they are expected to win by 2.  If they win by more than 2, their score goes up a smidge.  If they win by less than 2, their score goes down a smidge.  Teams need 3 or 4 games in their data before their first rating shows up.  So with this type of ranking, it doesn't really matter if teams are playing up.  A 2007 team rated 42 should tie a 2008 team rated 42.  And whichever team wins will have their rating upped a smidge, and the team that loses will have their rating go down a smidge.  This head-to-head goals rating works quite well within a league / area, but if there are never any tournaments or other avenues for there to be cross-play between teams, leagues, or even states, there can certainly be some drift over different geographies.  Nothing that will move the needle by several goals, but certainly some effect.  Now - the amount that the rating changes, and how much weight is given to more recent games compared to older games, and when do older game results drop off entirely; that's all secret sauce that I don't believe was publicized for YSL, and hasn't been for this update either.    

From personal experience - I have found the rankings to be extremely helpful in terms of what type of game we will expect, and I truly can't remember an instance where the rankings turned out to be entirely wrong.  For example, this weekend - we had 3 games.  We were expected to win one by 4-1, the second by 4-1, and tie the third 2-2.  This meant we could expect to do well in 2, and have a tighter game for the third.  Turns out we won the first 8-0, the second 7-1, and for the game we were expected to tie - we won 3-0 when the other team fell apart once scored upon.



rainbow_unicorn said:


> Sounds like these rankings are not very accurate.  I see some third teams ranked higher than the same club's first team.


That hasn't been my experience.  If things seem wonky for a particular team or set of teams, go into that team's specific data that is being pulled in, and confirm that the source data is actually mapped to the correct team in each case.  If A beats B, and B beats C, A should be better than C, and should show that in the rankings over time.  Anything can happen in a single game - but the results will map to the expectations over time, as the ratings will correspond back to the results - as long as the right data is assigned to the right team.



Brav520 said:


> Question
> 
> How secure is our payment information
> 
> ...


Right - it's just an app in the app store like any other.  Subscription gets paid via whatever payment process you have set up for your apple account.


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## Sike (Aug 29, 2022)

rainbow_unicorn said:


> Sounds like these rankings are not very accurate.  I see some third teams ranked higher than the same club's first team.


Agreed. These don't appear to be as accurate as YSR were. I only really know 2 age groups, and neither seem very accurate for Socal teams.


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## soccersc (Aug 29, 2022)

Sike said:


> Agreed. These don't appear to be as accurate as YSR were. I only really know 2 age groups, and neither seem very accurate for Socal teams.


It is the same program as YSR, with Mark, same guy. I think with the last few seasons being odd with Covid and so many teams changing over the last couple years, it is going to take some time to sort out. But it is way way better than any other ranking program and I have found it to be pretty accurate. So much better than Got Soccer Ranking, those are ridiculous


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## SoulTrain (Aug 29, 2022)

As someone who misses YSR, the app is a great addition and, as others have said, $10 a year for the PRO version is a bargain.  For those talking about the accuracy, as more data comes in, the better it will get.  Mark is also super responsive so if you see something that needs to be fixed, there is an easy tab on the app to send an email inquiry.  If you fix inaccuracies with your team and merge teams if needed you'll make the app better for everyone.  Without YSR, bracketing at tournaments this year suffered, I know tournament directors everywhere will love having a factual-based ranking system back in place.  Pay the $10, sign up for PRO, keep small and innovative businesses thriving!


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## Soccer Dad & Ref (Aug 29, 2022)

For the love of god, why do coaches enter the teams into tournaments with different names?


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## SoccerFan4Life (Aug 29, 2022)

I paid $10 and surprised to see how up to date it was.  Don’t  get caught up on the rankings accuracy.  Look at the millions spent on the bcs computations and yet people still complain.   Just saying


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## Code (Aug 30, 2022)

Soccer Dad & Ref said:


> For the love of god, why do coaches enter the teams into tournaments with different names?


Probably because they do not want to be associated with the results.  If things go well, they claim it; goes bad, they hide it.  The higher performing teams are usually consistent in identifing the team and coach clearly.  I've noticed a trend that a lot of GA and E64 teams leave their league designation off the team names at the smaller, local tournaments.  Leaves everyone wondering if it's the clubs GA team? The NPL team, Flight 1???  Then there is the affiliates rabbit hole.  Sometimes they let you know there is a distinction, other times, there are 6 "Legends" or "Rebels" teams in one age group bracket and you can't tell where any of them are from.


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## Soccer Dad & Ref (Aug 30, 2022)

Code said:


> Probably because they do not want to be associated with the results.  If things go well, they claim it; goes bad, they hide it.  The higher performing teams are usually consistent in identifing the team and coach clearly.  I've noticed a trend that a lot of GA and E64 teams leave their league designation off the team names at the smaller, local tournaments.  Leaves everyone wondering if it's the clubs GA team? The NPL team, Flight 1???  Then there is the affiliates rabbit hole.  Sometimes they let you know there is a distinction, other times, there are 6 "Legends" or "Rebels" teams in one age group bracket and you can't tell where any of them are from.


US Soccer should require a Team ID # that must be used.  Got Soccer has some sort of ID number, but this new app doesn't.


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## focomoso (Aug 30, 2022)

Soccer Dad & Ref said:


> US Soccer should require a Team ID # that must be used.  Got Soccer has some sort of ID number, but this new app doesn't.


Agreed, but... sometimes the teams that go to tournaments are legitimately not the same as the ones that play in league. There's a lot of shuffling to fill a tournament roster because not everyone can go - especially for the Thanksgiving and Easter tournaments. You'll see kids from lower and younger (and sometimes higher) teams from the same club guesting. And sometimes just purely random kids. My son has done this a lot over the years.


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## TeamDadJokes (Aug 30, 2022)

Soccer Dad & Ref said:


> US Soccer should require a Team ID # that must be used.  Got Soccer has some sort of ID number, but this new app doesn't.


Some coaches use a team name to indicate what level they are even if the entire roster has turned over. For example,. Legends will rank its team FC, Gold, Black and White from strongest to lowest. The roster and coaches on those teams may switch titles from year to year. In some instances, and entire roster may leave (such as going from 9v9 to 11v11) and essentially its a new team but with the same team title. That team should not get the ranking of the old team and its roster that are no longer present (I'm specifically talking about scenarios like where 10 of the 12 on the roster have moved on).


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## VanMan (Aug 30, 2022)

Soccer Dad & Ref said:


> For the love of god, why do coaches enter the teams into tournaments with different names?





Code said:


> Probably because they do not want to be associated with the results.  If things go well, they claim it; goes bad, they hide it.  The higher performing teams are usually consistent in identifing the team and coach clearly.  I've noticed a trend that a lot of GA and E64 teams leave their league designation off the team names at the smaller, local tournaments.  Leaves everyone wondering if it's the clubs GA team? The NPL team, Flight 1???  Then there is the affiliates rabbit hole.  Sometimes they let you know there is a distinction, other times, there are 6 "Legends" or "Rebels" teams in one age group bracket and you can't tell where any of them are from.


More often than not it's the Team Manager, not the coach, doing the tournament registrations.  Usually the higher performing teams have managers that are more aware and/or experienced and/or detailed oriented enough to keep it consistent. Most tournament platforms identify the coach with the team so it can be figured out, it just takes a little more effort.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Sep 2, 2022)

Soccer drama on the field has made it to this rankings app!  A progressively rougher game this weekend kept escalating without much ref control and ended with a fistfight between two players.  The field was stormed by parents pushing and screaming at each other, and the ref called the game with just a few minutes left.  Multiple red cards, and dispute filed with the league, which will almost certainly be in our favor.  

Noticed this week that our ratings kept getting messed up (by somebody incorrectly adding data sources for game results).  I would revert them the next day, but the same problem repeated itself twice.  The app owner investigated, and someone was intentionally and maliciously merging all the data into one team incorrectly to remove us from the ratings.  That same user has primarily made edits for the club in question from this weekend.  That user is now blocked from edits in the app.  

I was hoping for the development of a web interface once again, which made it easier to interact with the data on a larger screen with a keyboard/mouse.  But I can see the advantages of an App here from the development/maintenance side, especially for cases like this.  The developer doesn't have to worry about managing accounts, authentication, or any other user-specific information - apple/google just issues a unique and anonymized ID that effectively ties a device to a user (and their subscription).  When one of the ID's misbehaves, it can have its privileges curtailed.  That same individual would need to sign up from a different phone - and pay for another subscription - to continue to misbehave.  While that's certainly not impossible - it's much less likely than in the prior world, where anyone could edit the rankings on the website with no authentication, no cost, and no consequences.


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## SoccerFan4Life (Sep 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> Noticed this week that our ratings kept getting messed up (by somebody incorrectly adding data sources for game results).  I would revert them the next day, but the same problem repeated itself twice.  The app owner investigated, and someone was intentionally and maliciously merging all the data into one team incorrectly to remove us from the ratings.  That same user has primarily made edits for the club in question from this weekend.  That user is now blocked from edits in the app.
> 
> I was hoping for the development of a web interface once again, which made it easier to interact with the data on a larger screen with a keyboard/mouse.  But I can see the advantages of an App here from the development/maintenance side, especially for cases like this.  The


I wonder what these parents that create  problems will do once their player is done with sports.    Clearly they don’t have a life to go to these extremes of manipulating data.     Call them out.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 18, 2022)

Latest app version for iOS has added some new features.  Teams now have distinct ratings for offense & defense (as well as the existing overall rating), and Clubs are now ranked as well.  From the Club page, it shows all the teams associated with it, along with individual ratings.  It's unclear, to me at least, how the Club rating is calculated.  It's clearly some aggregation of the ratings of the individual teams, but I don't know how it's weighted, or how unranked teams within the club affect or don't affect it.


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## Carlsbad7 (Oct 18, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> Latest app version for iOS has added some new features.  Teams now have distinct ratings for offense & defense (as well as the existing overall rating), and Clubs are now ranked as well.  From the Club page, it shows all the teams associated with it, along with individual ratings.  It's unclear, to me at least, how the Club rating is calculated.  It's clearly some aggregation of the ratings of the individual teams, but I don't know how it's weighted, or how unranked teams within the club affect or don't affect it.


Ranking Clubs is *VERY* interesting...

Right now "the best" clubs in socal have created their own insulated leagues to insure wins (and losses) against predetermined opponents. This does not benefit players + specifically does benefit clubs because it allows them to control outcomes + make players that want to play at the highest levels jump through hoops. 

Also most parents might know a single age group or two on either the boys or girls side but not the overall status of the club. This is why you end up with all the ECNL/GA/Next/bla/bla/bla pissing matches.

Showing which clubs consistently have wins across all age groups and genders puts DOCs + club presidents on the hot seat for performance.


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## focomoso (Oct 18, 2022)

toucan said:


> Anyone know whether or when the Android version will come out?


It's out. I have it. Works well. It's called "Soccer Rankings" in the Google play store.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 18, 2022)

toucan said:


> Anyone know whether or when the Android version will come out?


Soccer Rankings on Google Play
Soccer Rankings on Apple Store

His main site:  https://usasportstatistics.net/

It looks like he is prioritizing feature release on the iOS platform; I imagine he has more installs on that side at the moment.  The Android version has gotten the same features over time, but it has been delayed a bit for each release.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 18, 2022)

Carlsbad7 said:


> Right now "the best" clubs in socal have created their own insulated leagues to insure wins (and losses) against predetermined opponents. This does not benefit players + specifically does benefit clubs because it allows them to control outcomes + make players that want to play at the highest levels jump through hoops.


As someone who isn't in the socal area (just a bit north of you folks), looking at the socal clubs is quite confusing.  Many of what appear to be the top clubs have a billion teams with very similar names, making it very hard to figure out which team is which, and how to attribute particular results to the right team over time.  If you look at many of the top individual teams, it's typically a single team that has a single data source that has had an amazing past 10 games, and no history past that.  That's why ranking the club should normalize some of this, and weight all results of all teams in a way that is meaningful - but there are certainly many reasonable arguments about how to do that calculation in a variety of different ways.


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## Carlsbad7 (Oct 18, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> As someone who isn't in the socal area (just a bit north of you folks), looking at the socal clubs is quite confusing.  Many of what appear to be the top clubs have a billion teams with very similar names, making it very hard to figure out which team is which, and how to attribute particular results to the right team over time.  If you look at many of the top individual teams, it's typically a single team that has a single data source that has had an amazing past 10 games, and no history past that.  That's why ranking the club should normalize some of this, and weight all results of all teams in a way that is meaningful - but there are certainly many reasonable arguments about how to do that calculation in a variety of different ways.


I agree it's annoying. Once you're in the middle of it all everything "makes sense" if you want to call it that.

The groups that lose out by the way things are curently structured are players that never get a chance to compete at the highest level and clubs that also never get to play against the highest level teams.

What ends up happening is that clubs with access to highest levels of play simply recruit from everyone else that's boxed out. While this does produce a very limited set of high level players sometimes that group can be swayed by $$$. Also if everyone in socal just played each other youd end up with much more high level talent that what's currently produced.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 18, 2022)

OK, I have clarification on how the Club ratings are calculated.  It's the average of the ratings of the top teams, as if two clubs playing each other all brought only their single best teams in each age group, then aggregated the scores to see who's on top.  Any second or lower team in any age group should have no effect on a club's rating.  

Knowing this - it looks like there is some weirdness in the data currently that doesn't seem to match this explanation, but I'm sure it will be ironed out over time as examples can be reviewed/corrected.


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## lafalafa (Oct 18, 2022)

Youth Rankings are like a "box of chocolates... "never know what you're going too get:

Fun stats or whatever for parents but  I rarely remember youth players mentioning or carrying on about rankings only that a team they where facing where past or current tournaments or league champions.

Youth soccer can be unpredictable at times,  past doesn't predict the future and ratings don't play the games.

For parents or coaches seeing trends can help in some areas so ranking data can be helpful.   Improvement as the time go by can be a positive+

Perpetual top (10) billing seems to happen each year for a certain set of clubs teams so it's just a way to see that in some cases.  Seeing a team in the top 5 for a long span can be a  plus for recruiting but in youth sports it's about how you finish each tournament or season that's more valuable.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 19, 2022)

lafalafa said:


> Youth soccer can be unpredictable at times,  past doesn't predict the future and ratings don't play the games.


This is true to a point, but it understates the predictive value.  It turns out the youth soccer *is* quite predictable based on past results.  With multiple seasons to point to now while using these ratings, in just my kid's case - I can look back to 65 individual games with ratings.  The team overperformed 7 times.  The team underperformed 10 times.  And performed as expected 48 times.  They have lost exactly one game, that they were predicted to win.  They have won a handful of games that they were predicted to lose.   (for clarity, they have a few hundred games of experience - it's just the data only goes back 65 games)

Just look up a team that you were aware of, look down in their history, and you can see the overperforming (marked in green) or underperforming (marked in red). 



lafalafa said:


> For parents or coaches seeing trends can help in some areas so ranking data can be helpful.   Improvement as the time go by can be a positive+


We went into a tournament a few weekends ago against some talented teams, with the prediction to lose 2 of 3, for varying amounts.  Walking out of that tournament with 3 ties means the coach has objective data showing how well the kids performed, and whether they are continuing to improve. 

Clearly anything can happen on any day, and sometimes there will certainly be surprises.  And there are the larger arguments, that since winning isn't the primary goal of youth soccer - predicting winning is even less important in the grand scheme of things. 

But fallible humans like knowing a little bit about what's going to happen tomorrow, from the weather to the markets to sports to reality TV results.  This app does a damn good job of feeding that itch.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 19, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> OK, I have clarification on how the Club ratings are calculated.  It's the average of the ratings of the top teams, as if two clubs playing each other all brought only their single best teams in each age group, then aggregated the scores to see who's on top.  Any second or lower team in any age group should have no effect on a club's rating.


The FAQ has been updated to explain the club rankings.

*Q: How are club rankings calculated?*
_
A: We use the average of the ratings of the top teams. This is equivalent to two clubs playing their top teams against each other and then aggregating the scores to see who is best.

We include the core competitive age groups of U11 - U17. If a club doesn’t have a team in an age group, then it is given zero credit in the average._


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 31, 2022)

The Club rankings algorithm has been tweaked a bit; I think it's been a good improvement.  It takes the top teams from U11 - U17 (1 top team from each age group), and calculates the average rating.  Clubs need at least 5 teams to be ranked.  It no longer averages zeroes in if there is no team in a specific age group.  It updates every day.  Here's what it's showing today for Girls, Boys, and Combined (in California).


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## Carlsbad7 (Oct 31, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> The Club rankings algorithm has been tweaked a bit; I think it's been a good improvement.  It takes the top teams from U11 - U17 (1 top team from each age group), and calculates the average rating.  Clubs need at least 5 teams to be ranked.  It no longer averages zeroes in if there is no team in a specific age group.  It updates every day.  Here's what it's showing today for Girls, Boys, and Combined (in California).
> 
> View attachment 14946 View attachment 14947 View attachment 14948


Interesting, theres clubs from ECNL, GA, Next, etc + Norcal and Socal. Also several clubs that that consistantly deliver quality but arent always recognized for it.

It wonder if this will drive clubs into their closed leagues or less.

It will definately make tournaments like Surf Cup where clubs play each that normally dont more interesting


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## futboldad1 (Oct 31, 2022)

Where YSR's algorithm failed was in over rewarding blowouts......meaning teams in Socal league who were winning 6-0 every weekend were ranked ahead of ECNL teams who were winning 2-1 or tying the majority of their games......I am assuming that is still the case.....YSR was still the best but this was a definite flaw at the older ages U-13+++


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 31, 2022)

I think any significant inaccuracies there may be more of a symptom of lack of inter-play, then a decision to overweight (or underweight) blowouts.  If in a hypothetical higher league, games are often 1 point affairs, while in a lower league, there are often blowouts - within each of the leagues themselves, relative ranking should remain accurate.  If a high scoring team in the lower league is 6 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 6 goals better.   And if a high scoring team in the higher league is only 3 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 3 goals better. 

Now if none of the higher league ever play any of the lower league in any recorded games or tournaments, it becomes a definition problem.  Do you set the top league starting point 3 points higher to start?  6 points higher?  20 points higher?  To establish the first reference point, it's probably a bit of finger held up in the wind.  After only 5 or 6 games within that league, there is plenty of info to rate the individual teams against each other, even if there is zero history prior of any of them.  But if there is no relative history of those teams playing with any of the teams in the other league, it can be stuck at whatever initial rating was assumed.  And in this hypothetical construct - a very high scoring team in the lower league might be expected to show a rating higher than an average team in the higher league.

So it becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, where leagues that are completely separated from play from other leagues, can't objectively and mathematically be ranked against each other - simply because there aren't enough events to point to where teams from the leagues are compared (via actual games) with each other.  However - every time that even a single team within a closed league does go outside to play a tournament or similar against outside teams, that result is then applicable back to the source league, to help balance and normalize the rankings of even teams that never go outside for opponents.  It appeared that one good example of this were the teams in Alaska earlier this year.  The ratings of some of them were uncomfortably high.  They tend to only play each other (it's Alaska!) so there is very little inter-play outside.  But looking through them all recently, it seems there were enough tournaments that pulled just enough of them out to play outside, that the ratings of the entire state appear much more normalized with what one might expect. 

With all of this, it becomes a bit intuitive that national ratings numbers between a team in Dubuque, a team in Boston, and a team in Seattle, may be a bit off - if none of them every play each other, and they don't play anyone else who plays them, and they don't play anyone else who plays them who plays them, etc.   It's like trying to compare AAA baseball here in the US to the 2nd level baseball league in Japan.  You can try - but without direct play, it's going to be mostly conjecture no matter how you try to do it.  But - the relative rankings in the case of this app are necessarily much more relevant when you're using them to compare against teams in your area or conference who you actually do play, or will play, or have played.


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## Carlsbad7 (Oct 31, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> I think any significant inaccuracies there may be more of a symptom of lack of inter-play, then a decision to overweight (or underweight) blowouts.  If in a hypothetical higher league, games are often 1 point affairs, while in a lower league, there are often blowouts - within each of the leagues themselves, relative ranking should remain accurate.  If a high scoring team in the lower league is 6 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 6 goals better.   And if a high scoring team in the higher league is only 3 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 3 goals better.
> 
> Now if none of the higher league ever play any of the lower league in any recorded games or tournaments, it becomes a definition problem.  Do you set the top league starting point 3 points higher to start?  6 points higher?  20 points higher?  To establish the first reference point, it's probably a bit of finger held up in the wind.  After only 5 or 6 games within that league, there is plenty of info to rate the individual teams against each other, even if there is zero history prior of any of them.  But if there is no relative history of those teams playing with any of the teams in the other league, it can be stuck at whatever initial rating was assumed.  And in this hypothetical construct - a very high scoring team in the lower league might be expected to show a rating higher than an average team in the higher league.
> 
> ...


Just to throw more gas on the fire often teams play up a year in tournaments. How does this track back to rankings?

If teams are able to compete a year or two up from their natural age how does this translate to age appropriate ranking?


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## focomoso (Oct 31, 2022)

Carlsbad7 said:


> Just to throw more gas on the fire often teams play up a year in tournaments. How does this track back to rankings?
> 
> If teams are able to compete a year or two up from their natural age how does this translate to age appropriate ranking?


This one is well accounted for because everything is based only on team-to-team results. If a team plays up, they will be playing against teams with higher starting scores which will be reflected in their results.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Oct 31, 2022)

Carlsbad7 said:


> Just to throw more gas on the fire often teams play up a year in tournaments. How does this track back to rankings?
> 
> If teams are able to compete a year or two up from their natural age how does this translate to age appropriate ranking?





focomoso said:


> This one is well accounted for because everything is based only on team-to-team results. If a team plays up, they will be playing against teams with higher starting scores which will be reflected in their results.


Yep, that's exactly right.  The ratings are independent of age.  A team of a certain age gets a rating.  If that team plays up a year, they still have the same rating - and they are still the same team.  If that team plays up 2 years, they still have the same rating.  It's expected that the teams they will be playing in the higher ages will, on average, have higher ratings themselves - so if the team playing up does well against them, their own rating will improve.

The only way this works though is if the team names used for a single team remain consistent.  In most cases, they do, for league play and for major competitions.  If the "2011B Firecrackers" play up in the 2010 bracket, they are still named the "2011B Firecrackers", while playing in that bracket.  In the app - they remain in the 2011 age group, because the team is defined as a 2011 age team.  If it turns out that the team is really playing 2010 brackets exclusively - you can just change the team profile in the app to 2010 if you choose, so you can see how that team is ranked with other teams in the 2010 age group.  Or it can stay a 2011 team if it really is made up of 2011 kids, and it just plays up occasionally.  Changing the age has zero effect on the rating for the team - the ratings occur just due to the opponents the team has and the relative performance against them.

The issue that can come up though, is if the coach/mgr submits the team to a tournament, and calls the team "2010B Firecrackers Tournament version (2011)" or anything else that is substantially different than the original team name of "2011B Firecrackers".  If the tournament system doesn't have a field to enter in the GotSoccer/GotSport team ID, and the team name is a one-off, it gets pulled in as a new team - and now there is an unranked team in the standings tied to those specific tournament results.  The coach, manager, or anyone else with a Pro account can find those results once they are pulled in, and assign them to the main "2011B Firecrackers" team if they are pretty sure that the results are actually from that same team.


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## Soccer Dad & Ref (Oct 31, 2022)

focomoso said:


> This one is well accounted for because everything is based only on team-to-team results. If a team plays up, they will be playing against teams with higher starting scores which will be reflected in their results.


I’m confused. Aren’t the rankings and ratings only meant for within that age bracket?


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## MARsSPEED (Nov 1, 2022)

So I've noticed the email contacts are no longer working. I wrote for a correction of a Showcase event that had been double reported and got it got pinged back to me. Anyone know anything about this?


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 1, 2022)

Soccer Dad & Ref said:


> I’m confused. Aren’t the rankings and ratings only meant for within that age bracket?


That's not correct.  The ratings are on a single scale across all age brackets.  A 2010 boys team rated 45 and a 2011 team rated 45 would be expected to be dead even if they played each other.  And a 2010 boys team rated 45 and a 2011 girls team rated 45 would also be expected to be dead even.  A 2010 team rated 45, playing a 2011 team rated 40, would be expected to win a typical game by 5 goals.

Now since these ratings are adjusted continuously by teams playing each other, the relative differences in rating within an age group are almost certainly more accurate, than the relative differences between different age groups, if teams rarely (if ever) actually play each other across the particular age difference.  Saying that a 2006 team ranked 52 would be a 2013 team ranked 31 by 21 goals is a bit silly for any number of reasons.  It might be by 10 goals, it might be by 150 goals if the older team was going for the world record - it's a silly hypothetical that wouldn't actually happen in the real world.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 1, 2022)

MARsSPEED said:


> So I've noticed the email contacts are no longer working. I wrote for a correction of a Showcase event that had been double reported and got it got pinged back to me. Anyone know anything about this?


Are you using support@usasportstatistics.net?  Main site is up at:  https://usasportstatistics.net/


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## MARsSPEED (Nov 1, 2022)

Yep, that and Mark's email address bouncing back.


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## dad4 (Nov 1, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> I think any significant inaccuracies there may be more of a symptom of lack of inter-play, then a decision to overweight (or underweight) blowouts.  *If in a hypothetical higher league, games are often 1 point affairs, while in a lower league, there are often blowouts *- within each of the leagues themselves, relative ranking should remain accurate.  If a high scoring team in the lower league is 6 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 6 goals better.   And if a high scoring team in the higher league is only 3 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 3 goals better.
> 
> Now if none of the higher league ever play any of the lower league in any recorded games or tournaments, it becomes a definition problem.  Do you set the top league starting point 3 points higher to start?  6 points higher?  20 points higher?  To establish the first reference point, it's probably a bit of finger held up in the wind.  After only 5 or 6 games within that league, there is plenty of info to rate the individual teams against each other, even if there is zero history prior of any of them.  But if there is no relative history of those teams playing with any of the teams in the other league, it can be stuck at whatever initial rating was assumed.  And in this hypothetical construct - a very high scoring team in the lower league might be expected to show a rating higher than an average team in the higher league.
> 
> ...


Blowouts and lack of cross-play seem to be a feature of closed leagues.  Other than Southwest, the top team in each division is in their own little silo. 

On the girls side, the top ranked team in most of the age groups is winning their league games by an average of 6 goals or so.  

It’s like watching Bayern in Bundesliga.  The league games don’t tell you anything.  The real information comes when they leave their small pond.  (Nationals, Surf cup, Jefferson Cup, etc.)


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## younothat (Nov 1, 2022)

Youth soccer rankings are a trivial pursuit for adults basically,  kids just want to play the game.

My players have generally always been on "top ranked" teams by the end of the season(s) but don't really matter to them.

It really goes down to coaching and the environment,” the league you play in whatever is was/is: DA, ECNL, MLS-next it doesn’t really matter as much as the coaching and environment, Pseudo titles and rankings don't play the games.

As long as you have a good influence, coaches, and a good mentor that you believe in and buy into their philosophy, methodology, and the environment that they are creating a player can get better, improve and benefit for that environment.

Beyond Youth , Coaches rankings would seem to be predictable but its always a moving target and they either do those infrequently or the committees are limited numbers which sometimes produces a bias to the more established or well known programs.

Being in the top 10 matters in college NCCA for post season berths and the competition is pretty fierce and of course it helps with recruiting a bunch since players are attracted to "winning" programs.

Have fun with it, spot trends or whatever but rankings are trivial and many teams play the same limited set several times and its very geo bound. If you want to worry about the rankings, don't' sweat the youth ones, Plenty of time for that later in college or after.

Good youth coaches generally don't need rankings to tell them or objectify how a team or players are doing, they should know and make the adjustments accordingly


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 1, 2022)

dad4 said:


> On the girls side, the top ranked team in most of the age groups is winning their league games by an average of 6 goals or so.


Where are you seeing this?  I just looked at all the age groups in Girls (California), and while that is mostly the case for some of the youngers (2011 and younger), by the time they get to 2010 it's just not the case at all.  The very top girls team in the state (2010) looks like this for past 20 games:

1-0, 1-0, 3-2, 5-0, 1-0, 3-1, 9-0, 6-0, 7-0, 4-1, 3-0, 2-0, 8-1, 1-0, 6-0, 9-1, 2-2, 6-1, 0-2, 5-1, 2-0

Going older to the 2009, 2008, and beyond, they all look similar.  If at one point in time - it looked like blowouts were both happening often, and being over-rewarded by this algorithm - that's certainly not what the ratings are showing now.



dad4 said:


> It’s like watching Bayern in Bundesliga.  The league games don’t tell you anything.  The real information comes when they leave their small pond.  (Nationals, Surf cup, Jefferson Cup, etc.)


Maybe, but this shouldn't stay that way for long, or forever.  If a team is blowing away other lesser teams in their own pond, they should have a higher rating that corresponds to that.  The ratings are driven by results - there is no magic to them.  If it turns out they are a "fake" 48, and when they go to a large tournament against a "real" 48, they get shellacked - their rating will be affected significantly, which then in turn affects all the ratings over time back at the pond.  The more crossplay over time - the less the drift; the less crossplay - the higher chance of a closed pond having ratings that are not calibrated well with other ponds.



younothat said:


> Youth soccer rankings are a trivial pursuit for adults basically,  kids just want to play the game.


Yes, and Yes.  But it's adults that are choosing where their kids should play, it's adults choosing what leagues and tournaments their teams pursue, it's adults choosing/accepting how to be bracketed in those tournaments, and it's adults dealing with other adults when managing a team long-term for success of its players, the teams, and the club as a whole.  

Effective ratings help those adults with useful information about all of those decisions, and they can highlight when those decisions are being made poorly.  It's certainly not the only useful information - it's just data.  A good coach vs. a bad coach, and ultimately choosing what coach/org is best for your child throughout their youth soccer career, has many, many factors that all need to be understood and evaluated over time.


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## Carlsbad7 (Nov 1, 2022)

What I'm seeing with this app + club rankings is that Tournaments that host teams from different clubs (Surf Cup, etc)  is the most risk/reward for leagues/clubs.

Considering the way clubs setup closed leagues to guarantee results logically it would make sense that they do the same thing with Tournaments. Meaning GA clubs would only do GA tournaments, ECNL clubs would only do ECNL tournaments, etc

Just a matter of time before GA/ECNL make a rule that member clubs only play in approved Tournaments with teams in their associated league.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 1, 2022)

You may very well be right, and that would be a shame.  Then comparing teams in different leagues turns into an argument at the bar where you're convinced your hockey team is better than their badminton team.  

On a separate but related note, the club rankings are likely going to change significantly soon as well.  Turns out that allowing 5 out of 7 teams in that competitive age area means that it will filter for clubs that only have 5 teams in the top 5 ages.  The top National clubs, and even some of the top State clubs in large states like California become ones that simply don't have any 2011 and 2012 teams.  Having those lower aged teams lowers the overall average of the club enough to make a large difference in the rankings -  even if their top 5 teams are the same as comparable clubs, or even better.  Averaging in zeros for clubs that don't have teams at that age level hurts the ranking so much that the club drops so far below clubs with all teams, that the ranking is unusable.  He's working on something to adjust between these two extremes, so we'll see what it comes up with next.


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## socalkdg (Nov 1, 2022)

futboldad1 said:


> Where YSR's algorithm failed was in over rewarding blowouts......meaning teams in Socal league who were winning 6-0 every weekend were ranked ahead of ECNL teams who were winning 2-1 or tying the majority of their games......I am assuming that is still the case.....YSR was still the best but this was a definite flaw at the older ages U-13+++


Agree.  Also think shutouts should count more as well.   I'll take a 2-0 win over 4-2 win.  Still lots of fun to follow.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 1, 2022)

socalkdg said:


> Agree.  Also think shutouts should count more as well.   I'll take a 2-0 win over 4-2 win.  Still lots of fun to follow.


Check out the separate offensive and defensive ratings that are given to teams now on the app - it helps take into account the differences that you've laid out.   A team that wins 4-2 consistently isn't the same team that wins 2-0 consistently, which I think is your point - and it's an accurate one.  This app made by the same guy who developed YSR, and it's based on the same mechanisms and principles - but it's changed and improved in a number of different ways.  Even if some of the criticism of YSR in past years was 100% valid - all of that doesn't translate into problems with the app currently.  It might have some of the same ones,  and it might even have new ones.


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## dad4 (Nov 1, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> Where are you seeing this?  I just looked at all the age groups in Girls (California), ...
> 
> 
> Maybe, but this shouldn't stay that way for long, or forever.  If a team is blowing away other lesser teams in their own pond, they should have a higher rating that corresponds to that.  The ratings are driven by results - there is no magic to them.  If it turns out they are a "fake" 48, and when they go to a large tournament against a "real" 48, they get shellacked - their rating will be affected significantly, which then in turn affects all the ratings over time back at the pond.  The more crossplay over time - the less the drift; the less crossplay - the higher chance of a closed pond having ratings that are not calibrated well with other ponds.


Look outside of Southwest.  Other regions get more blowouts, and it shows up in the rankings.  

It doesn't quite wash out.  The average pond rating will be about right.   But the distribution of that rating within the pond will be off.  The big fish has a fake 48 (real 46), but the little fish have fake 38s (real 40).

A small amount of cross play doesn't quite fix this.  The overrated teams lose a bit when they underperform at Jefferson Cup.  Underrated teams gain a bit when they overperform at some lesser tournament.  The fake 48 becomes a 47.  The fake 38 becomes a 39.  Then you have another 9-10 league games, and the fake 48 and fake 38 return.  

Still a great system.  But take it with a grain of salt whenever you see a string of 6-0 and 12-0 games against lower ranked teams.


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 1, 2022)

Top 2010G RL team is losing ranking despite being undefeated because the algorithm is predicting they have to win their games 7-0 and 5-0 on a consistent basis. Scores are going to be low when opponents are stacking 10/11 in the box the whole game.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 1, 2022)

dad4 said:


> It doesn't quite wash out.  The average pond rating will be about right.   But the distribution of that rating within the pond will be off.  The big fish has a fake 48 (real 46), but the little fish have fake 38s (real 40).


I see what you're saying, but I think I'm looking at the exact same data you describe and making a different conclusion.  Within that pond, in that context, nothing is fake.  If there are blowouts from big fish to little fish - that difference is representative of actual games between those fish (sorry, little fishies).   The average pond rating doesn't really matter.  If that pond continues to play among each other for a month or two - there is nothing fake about the relative ratings within pond.  

Now if you take that numerical rating and bring said big fish to a separate tournament (say, a great lake?), and it is made clear that the pond rating was way off, there will be an effect.  I take your point, that the effect isn't significant enough - that if the vast majority of the games remain back in the home pond and there just isn't enough cross-play to move the needle, the pond ratings will correspond accurately to performance at home pond - but are less meaningful as applied outwards.  For it to be significantly incorrect through - it turns out that the average pond rating wouldn't be about right.  It was set too high / too low, or it drifted too high / too low.      Pond-based big fish aren't getting a "fake" rating due to some ponds being blowout rich - they are getting a "fake" rating due to not enough fish on fish competition with other ponds to sort things out over time.

But regardless of the actual math differences - it does illustrate the larger point.  These particular ratings are more accurate if they are fed a bunch of relevant data, and are less accurate if they have too little relevant data.  Using them to see the ratings of an upcoming tournament or league game that you're actually entering - it may surprise you how accurate it can predict good games and bad games, strong competition and weak competition.  Using them to compare ratings across teams and leagues that have nothing at all to do with each other, and there is a bunch more wiggle room.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 1, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> Top 2010G RL team is losing ranking despite being undefeated because the algorithm is predicting they have to win their games 7-0 and 5-0 on a consistent basis. Scores are going to be low when opponents are stacking 10/11 in the box the whole game.


I'm assuming a lot here, but looking at the data of what I think you're referring to - I don't see the issue.  Here are the standings for the RL G10 Mojave group.  I've added a column to that spreadsheet, with the current rating as of today:



The rating tracks to the standing in the conference almost exactly.  There are small nuances between #4 & #5 and #8 seems a little low, but in general - it maps pretty closely.  Which makes sense, the ratings come from the performance in games.  But more importantly - if you look at the history for the #1 team, and look back on their last 20 games, the app clearly shows that they performed exactly as expected 18 times, and underperformed twice.  That's a ringing endorsement that the rating that they have corresponds to the results they are seeing because, again, it's circular.  They get the rating that they perform at, and they perform at the rating they get.  Now look forward, to see what's likely to happen in their next two games.  They should beat HB Koge by about 2 goals, and they should beat Pateadores by about 4.  Will they do that in either?  Who knows.  But the app gives them a 62% chance of winning against HB Koge, a 16% chance of tieing, and a 22% chance of losing.  Against Pateadores, they have a 78% chance of winning, a 9% chance of tieing, and 13% chance of losing.

So the question is, is that 41.00 low compared to what it could be if they played outside the conference with more challenging teams?  Who knows.   #1 team in the state is showing a 45.47 in ECNL, and Slammers RL is showing a 41.00 as the #25 team in the state.  Considering two months ago they lost 4-1 to Beach ECNL (43.44),  and 2-1 to Slammers ECNL (42.39), it doesn't seem terribly off at all to me.


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## jojon (Nov 1, 2022)

I am not sure how team rating would help parents decide whether they should find another club for their child or not. The coach and club may care for marketing and perhaps even coach evaluation but not very useful for parents.
If the team is rated very high but your kids are playing 20% of the time, how does it matter?
Whether the team has high or low rating, I think any child should move to different team after 1 year of playing less than 50%.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 1, 2022)

jojon said:


> I am not sure how team rating would help parents decide whether they should find another club for their child or not. The coach and club may care for marketing and perhaps even coach evaluation but not very useful for parents.


I'm not sure that a rating alone is the strongest signal, or even a strong signal, about whether an individual player should leave the team they are on.



jojon said:


> If the team is rated very high but your kids are playing 20% of the time, how does it matter?
> 
> Whether the team has high or low rating, I think any child should move to different team after 1 year of playing less than 50%.


I agree completely.  If you're not getting enough playing time for an extended period - it doesn't matter how good the team is, the player isn't getting any benefit of it, and isn't improving themselves at a sufficient rate to change the situation.  It's likely time to find another team.   

On the other end of the bench, if the player is the lone star or one of the few clear stars on a team - with more than sufficient playtime - yet the team isn't improving, and there's nowhere appropriate to move up in the club; it may be time for that player to find another team as well.   

When either of those players is looking for a new place - the quality of the team/club/coach/cost/logistics are all a factor, and knowing how all of those compare to their peers seems useful.


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## dad4 (Nov 1, 2022)

jojon said:


> I am not sure how team rating would help parents decide whether they should find another club for their child or not. The coach and club may care for marketing and perhaps even coach evaluation but not very useful for parents.
> If the team is rated very high but your kids are playing 20% of the time, how does it matter?
> Whether the team has high or low rating, I think any child should move to different team after 1 year of playing less than 50%.


You don’t use ratings to find a team to play for.  You use ratings to find a team to play against.  

If your team is a 37 and the other team is a 37, it’s probably a decent game.  Worth setting up the scrimmage.


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 1, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> I'm assuming a lot here, but looking at the data of what I think you're referring to - I don't see the issue.  Here are the standings for the RL G10 Mojave group.  I've added a column to that spreadsheet, with the current rating as of today:
> 
> View attachment 14959
> 
> ...


I guess for me, there should be some type of cap for a margin of victory before it affects your score going down. 3-0 win shouldn’t count against your team. All you’re asking for is for coaches to run up the scores now..


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## Code (Nov 1, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> I guess for me, there should be some type of cap for a margin of victory before it affects your score going down. 3-0 win shouldn’t count against your team. All you’re asking for is for coaches to run up the scores now..


I doubt any coach worth playing with is making strategic team decisions based on thier teams ranking in a youth soccer app.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> I guess for me, there should be some type of cap for a margin of victory before it affects your score going down. 3-0 win shouldn’t count against your team. All you’re asking for is for coaches to run up the scores now..


For all any of us know, there are mechanisms to minimize that effect.  You are assuming quite a bit about the algorithm, and looking at this specific data for this specific team - there is no clear requirement for them to run up the score in all but one game.  If they are playing a particularly unfortunate team, yes, the expected score is going to be high.  There is a team in that bracket that has 2 goals for, 42 goals against so far this year.  If the best team in the league beats them 3-0, it's just not a good showing, and provides some data that the unfortunate team's opponent may not have performed at their best either - compared to its competitors who win with a significantly higher margin.  In this case -  it looks like the Slammers rating went down from 41.00 to 40.98 after this weekend's game against such a team.  It might feel unfair, but it's also so minor that it isn't a big deal.  Conversely, do you believe that their rating should go up by beating the last place team 3-0?  So here's the info for what this particular team has to do for every remaining league game to maintain their rating (assuming ratings of each stay relatively consistent with today):

Slammers FC HB Koge RL 2-0
Pateadores RL  3-0
LAFC So Cal RL  2-0
Eagles SC RL 2-0
LA Breakers FC RL  4-0
Eagles SC RL  2-0
Phoenix Rising RL  3-0
San Diego Surf RL  3-0
Heat FC RL  7-0
Sporting California USA RL 3-0
So Cal Blues ECNL RL  1-0
LAFC So Cal RL  2-0
Sporting California USA RL 3-0
Utah Royals FC-AZ RL  4-0
Beach FC RL 1-0
Legends FC RL  1-0

Blowouts aren't required in all but 1 case.  And - either achieving all of these or none of these or some of these isn't an objective success or a failure of the team.  But what it does mean, is that their performance rating will go up compared to their peers if these are exceeded.  And if they aren't met, their performance rating will go down compared to their peers.  Their rating might also go up a bit throughout the season even by matching these expectations, as the average rating for that particular league goes up by any external play.  It also might go down - but that's less likely; typically scores continue to go up both throughout the year and from year to year until U17 or higher.


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## Hodari (Nov 2, 2022)

Xmas break camp!!!


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## dad4 (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> I see what you're saying, but I think I'm looking at the exact same data you describe and making a different conclusion.  Within that pond, in that context, nothing is fake.  If there are blowouts from big fish to little fish - that difference is representative of actual games between those fish (sorry, little fishies).   The average pond rating doesn't really matter.  If that pond continues to play among each other for a month or two - there is nothing fake about the relative ratings within pond.
> 
> Now if you take that numerical rating and bring said big fish to a separate tournament (say, a great lake?), and it is made clear that the pond rating was way off, there will be an effect.  I take your point, that the effect isn't significant enough - that if the vast majority of the games remain back in the home pond and there just isn't enough cross-play to move the needle, the pond ratings will correspond accurately to performance at home pond - but are less meaningful as applied outwards.  For it to be significantly incorrect through - it turns out that the average pond rating wouldn't be about right.  It was set too high / too low, or it drifted too high / too low.      Pond-based big fish aren't getting a "fake" rating due to some ponds being blowout rich - they are getting a "fake" rating due to not enough fish on fish competition with other ponds to sort things out over time.
> 
> But regardless of the actual math differences - it does illustrate the larger point.  These particular ratings are more accurate if they are fed a bunch of relevant data, and are less accurate if they have too little relevant data.  Using them to see the ratings of an upcoming tournament or league game that you're actually entering - it may surprise you how accurate it can predict good games and bad games, strong competition and weak competition.  Using them to compare ratings across teams and leagues that have nothing at all to do with each other, and there is a bunch more wiggle room.


Within the pond is the wrong question.  You don’t need YSR to compare teams in the same league.  You have league standings.  

YSR is more useful for comparing teams from different leagues.  It helps with questions like “how should I flight this tournament?” and “who should I call for a scrimmage?”

For that, the important question is the accuracy of ratings between ponds.  If this strong GA team plays that weak ECNL team, is it a reasonable match?  A system which over-values goal differential will give you the wrong answer.  

Totally agree that it would be more accurate if we didn’t divide up all the fish into their own little ponds.  You get weird things like Solar 2010 ECRL being ranked 7 points higher than Sting Austin ECNL.  Either the ratings system is off, or those two teams really ought to switch leagues.  (or both.)


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

dad4 said:


> Within the pond is the wrong question.  You don’t need YSR to compare teams in the same league.  You have league standings.


Yes, this is a fair point.  Those two sets of data should correlate so closely in most cases that you don't need both.  Yes - it may give a better guess on goal differential for an in-league game than a guess not based on game results - but in the big picture it doesn't matter much.



dad4 said:


> YSR is more useful for comparing teams from different leagues.  It helps with questions like “how should I flight this tournament?” and “who should I call for a scrimmage?”
> 
> For that, the important question is the accuracy of ratings between ponds.  If this strong GA team plays that weak ECNL team, is it a reasonable match?  A system which over-values goal differential will give you the wrong answer.


Agreed, I also believe that is the main benefit.  But the assumption that the team comparisons across different ponds is already wrong, benefits those that don't want to admit that there may be some truth to those rating differences.  The statement that goal differentials are emphasized too much or too little isn't a matter of opinion, it's a math and data matter of actual results of what happens when teams meet and validate/invalidate those ratings.  When your team goes and plays a team that they haven't seen before - are the results as expected, or are they way off.  Look down at the last 30-50 games in the history, and identify which games were so far off of expectation that the results show up as Red (significantly lower than expected), or Green (significantly higher than expected).  Do the same for handful of other teams in your league, in other leagues, or even leagues that you are suspicious of such higher ratings.  If the amount of results that are unexpected is pretty small, it's a decent indicator that the ratings are reasonably close to results, and are reasonably predictive.   



dad4 said:


> Totally agree that it would be more accurate if we didn’t divide up all the fish into their own little ponds.  You get weird things like Solar 2010 ECRL being ranked 7 points higher than Sting Austin ECNL.  Either the ratings system is off, or those two teams really ought to switch leagues.  (or both.)


That's a good example to hash out.  I see that Solar SC RL has a rating of 42.82.  In addition to the ECNL RL league, they played the Premier Cup, the National Championships, a separate (unknown) league, the Texas State cup, the Dallas International Girls Cup, The Frontier Conference, The DTSC Fall Festival, and the Girls Classic league.  There are over 100 games of history that tie into their current rating.  Up until July this year, they generally either matched their rating or exceeded their rating in most games.  This would have continued to elevate their rating.   From August onwards, they more often underperformed against their rating - only exceeding it twice, which would have lowered their rating.  Just looking at the various team names from all over the country that they've played over this time period, I don't think the statement that blowouts in their own league is inflating their rating is fair or accurate.  There are just too many games for that to be significant at this point, and the recognition of that is clear in their history (and the red scores)

EDIT:  was looking at Sting ECRL - give me a sec


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

continued.....

I see that Sting Austin ECNL is sitting at a 36.26.  I see a history going back 35+ games.  In addition to ECNL, they have done some local tournaments in Austin, the Directors cup, WDDOA, the Bat City Cup, and 1 or 2 more.  I also see in that record, that have won 1 (1) game this year.  And in all of these results, it turns out they overperformed 3 times, and underperformed 16 times.  For every other game - they performed as expected.  And the expectation was not good.  

This isn't a ratings problem - you stated the actual solution to satirize it (swap teams/leagues), but it actually turns out to be true.  Sting Austin ECNL can expect to lose every game they play in league, and the rating reflects that.  Sadly, their current rating shows they'd likely to have the same results in ECRL if they started playing there tomorrow.


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## dad4 (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> continued.....
> 
> I see that Sting Austin ECNL is sitting at a 36.26.  I see a history going back 35+ games.  In addition to ECNL, they have done some local tournaments in Austin, the Directors cup, WDDOA, the Bat City Cup, and 1 or 2 more.  I also see in that record, that have won 1 (1) game this year.  And in all of these results, it turns out they overperformed 3 times, and underperformed 16 times.  For every other game - they performed as expected.  And the expectation was not good.
> 
> This isn't a ratings problem - you stated the actual solution to satirize it (swap teams/leagues), but it actually turns out to be true.  Sting Austin ECNL can expect to lose every game they play in league, and the rating reflects that.  Sadly, their current rating shows they'd likely to have the same results in ECRL if they started playing there tomorrow.


Satire?  I was serious.  Top RL teams should move up, and bottom NL teams should move down.   

Otherwise, you get games where the losing side parks the bus for 70-90 minutes.  No one learns anything from the game, and the kids on the losing end of it feel awful.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

OK, then it actually sounds like we're mostly in agreement here.  There's reasonable information to show that that particular Sting team really is that, uh, not strong.  And that particular Solar team really is that strong.  



dad4 said:


> You get weird things like Solar 2010 ECRL being ranked 7 points higher than Sting Austin ECNL.  Either the ratings system is off, or those two teams really ought to switch leagues.  (or both.)


Solar ECRL could likely do quite well in ECNL - but it turns out that their existing ECNL team would best them by ~ 2 goals.  The weird thing isn't due to any ratings, or standings, or anything else.  It's just a reality that the top teams in the lower league would likely do quite well against the bottom teams in the upper league.  The leagues aren't so far apart that there is this uncrossable gap between them without overlap.


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## Carlsbad7 (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> OK, then it actually sounds like we're mostly in agreement here.  There's reasonable information to show that that particular Sting team really is that, uh, not strong.  And that particular Solar team really is that strong.
> 
> 
> 
> Solar ECRL could likely do quite well in ECNL - but it turns out that their existing ECNL team would best them by ~ 2 goals.  The weird thing isn't due to any ratings, or standings, or anything else.  It's just a reality that the top teams in the lower league would likely do quite well against the bottom teams in the upper league.  The leagues aren't so far apart that there is this uncrossable gap between them without overlap.


If clubs are able to field a top level ECRL and top level ECNL team ECNL should just give them 2 ECNL teams.

ECNL isn't doing anyone any favors propping terrible teams up or holding talent back.

If both teams don't win at the ECNL level the lower of the 2 goes back to ECRL.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

I thought there was more of a difference between NL and RL than just team quality.  Don't the NL teams need to travel quite a bit more than RL, with more of a commitment from the players/parents/etc.?  I'd think it's possible that there are kids (and families) that are comfortable with the RL commitment but not the NL commitment, that may be at similar skill levels.  That could be one reason there are some phenomenal teams sitting at the top of RL without moving up (as players or as teams).


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> For all any of us know, there are mechanisms to minimize that effect.  You are assuming quite a bit about the algorithm, and looking at this specific data for this specific team - there is no clear requirement for them to run up the score in all but one game.  If they are playing a particularly unfortunate team, yes, the expected score is going to be high.  There is a team in that bracket that has 2 goals for, 42 goals against so far this year.  If the best team in the league beats them 3-0, it's just not a good showing, and provides some data that the unfortunate team's opponent may not have performed at their best either - compared to its competitors who win with a significantly higher margin.  In this case -  it looks like the Slammers rating went down from 41.00 to 40.98 after this weekend's game against such a team.  It might feel unfair, but it's also so minor that it isn't a big deal.  Conversely, do you believe that their rating should go up by beating the last place team 3-0?  So here's the info for what this particular team has to do for every remaining league game to maintain their rating (assuming ratings of each stay relatively consistent with today):
> 
> Slammers FC HB Koge RL 2-0
> Pateadores RL  3-0
> ...


These ratings are already changed. Slammers RL was at 41.48 and was being asked to blow every team out and that’s just not going to happen at this level. The 3-0 this weekend wasn’t a bad showing, ball just didn’t go in, over 50 opportunities. Hey, it happens. But it’s not just the 3-0, rating started to go down when we beat a team 4-1 instead of 4-0 and etc.


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## Carlsbad7 (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> I thought there was more of a difference between NL and RL than just team quality.  Don't the NL teams need to travel quite a bit more than RL, with more of a commitment from the players/parents/etc.?  I'd think it's possible that there are kids (and families) that are comfortable with the RL commitment but not the NL commitment, that may be at similar skill levels.  That could be one reason there are some phenomenal teams sitting at the top of RL without moving up (as players or as teams).


Maybe this is the case. However it would be better for the Club to make that decision (using feedback from the parents) than the league continuing to allow deserving players to languish.


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 2, 2022)

And here was what the predictions were asking the team to perform


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 2, 2022)

What I find odd is that Solar RL remains pretty much unaffected by their 4 losses this league season and being towards the bottom of their league.. I guess 41 goals in 13 matches outweighs the 4 losses and being in 5th place? In contrast, Slammers has 8 wins out of their 8 matches and 30 goals for the season and only 3 goals conceded


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

I'm happy that we're looking at the same data, but I'm not sure why we are seeing it so differently.  Those predictions are what is necessary for a team to maintain their current rating according to their peers.  Go above it, rating moves up.  Go below it, rating moves down.  All the ratings of all teams that play each other are interrelated.  Over time - the average rating of an age group as a whole moves up in tandem (compare U11 to U12 to U13 etc.)

You're wildly exaggerating the requirements for your team to maintain the rating.  For the rest of the league games all year, there is one game where it is expected to be blowout (7-0 against Heat).  Only two games require a 4 goal difference.  Everything else is 3 or lower.  I just reloaded each team, and here are those predictions again:

Slammers FC HB Koge RL 2-0
Pateadores RL 3-0
LAFC So Cal RL 2-0
Eagles SC RL 2-0
LA Breakers FC RL 4-0
Eagles SC RL 2-0
Phoenix Rising RL 3-0
San Diego Surf RL 3-0
Heat FC RL 7-0
Sporting California USA RL 3-0
So Cal Blues ECNL RL 1-0
LAFC So Cal RL 2-0
Sporting California USA RL 3-0
Utah Royals FC-AZ RL 4-0
Beach FC RL 1-0
Legends FC RL 1-0 

If you go out of league to play other teams, and you are wildly better than them - the expectation is that you will beat them soundly.  If you go out of league to play other teams, and they are in fact rated higher than you - if/when you beat them your own rating will go up and theirs will go down.  

If you think there is a special "if team name = Solar then do something hinky with ratings" is baked into the app, I'm not sure what to tell you.  There are hundreds of thousands of teams keeping track of literally millions of games, all fed into the same program - and the data being shown is what it comes up with.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

That standings page of ECRL Texas is a bit broken as well.  It looks like someone decided to sort it by PPG instead of PTS.  If you sort the teams by points instead, it looks like below:   (I added the current ratings for each team as well)



The position in the league closely tracks the rating, as one would expect.  Solar shows a bit higher, so does FC Dallas RL.  Any number of reasons for this - but the only one that matters is that for the opponents they played, they achieved a certain goal differential (pos or neg), and that factors in to their score every time.  One indicator is how many more goals those teams have scored (41 & 39).  And their goal differential is much better than anyone else in the league (+24 and +28).


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

As of today, it looks like the average for the Socal RL division is roughly 1 goal lower than the Texas RL division.  Everything else being equal, it will be more challenging for a Socal team to match a rating with a higher rated Texas team, if they play equivalently (whatever equivalently means), and if that's an expectation or goal.


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## dad4 (Nov 2, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> What I find odd is that Solar RL remains pretty much unaffected by their 4 losses this league season and being towards the bottom of their league.. I guess 41 goals in 13 matches outweighs the 4 losses and being in 5th place? In contrast, Slammers has 8 wins out of their 8 matches and 30 goals for the season and only 3 goals conceded


An algorithm based on averaging goal differential will do exactly that.  A 3-4 loss and a 10-0 win earn you a higher ranking than a pair of 3-0 wins.


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> As of today, it looks like the average for the Socal RL division is roughly 1 goal lower than the Texas RL division.  Everything else being equal, it will be more challenging for a Socal team to match a rating with a higher rated Texas team, if they play equivalently (whatever equivalently means), and if that's an expectation or goal.
> 
> View attachment 14976
> 
> View attachment 14977


you also have to include the Sonoran division as Mojave also plays each team cross bracket during the season. That being said, the two highest rated teams Slammers RL and SoCal Blues are both around the same point total.

I guess in the end it’s more high stakes for these two teams to play lower teams should they not beat their predictions. I think those goal differentials are more achievable in 9v9 but not so much in 11v11 once these teams get their bearings on playing a big field.

I think it’s also kind of always been my gripe with the website and now the program that teams can play in lower leagues and hide in bottom bracket tournaments and it inflates their rankings because of goal differential.

I’m very familiar with how the ratings work, one higher rated team has a predictive value and another has their predictive value and that difference is goal differential. But a 2010 RL team rated 35 is predicted to lose to the top 2014 team. I can’t imagine a group of 8 year olds beating on 12 year olds. I think there should be some type of cap for rating (wins, losses, goal scored, goals against, age, and difficulty of bracket).


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

dad4 said:


> An algorithm based on averaging goal differential will do exactly that.  A 3-4 loss and a 10-0 win earn you a higher ranking than a pair of 3-0 wins.


Almost - there needs to be a caveat that the opponents are identical in this setup.  If the games are against separate teams, it's entirely feasible that a 3-4 loss against a stellar opponent will help a rating more than a 3-0 win against a cellar-dwelling team.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

First - let me say congratulations on what looks to have been a fantastic start to this season.  The team is clearly playing very well, and has become the standout team in their league. All of that should be a much more important realization than any of this silly rating discussion.  



TeamDadJokes said:


> I guess in the end it’s more high stakes for these two teams to play lower teams should they not beat their predictions. I think those goal differentials are more achievable in 9v9 but not so much in 11v11 once these teams get their bearings on playing a big field.


Maybe it would help to think about it slightly differently.  The current rating of the team (any team) *is already* a reflection of how they've played in the past.  Their exact performances in the past, the goal differentials against teams of certain ratings, all of the previous team results - this is reflected in their current rating.  To keep their current rating - they essentially have to do nothing more, and nothing less, than they've already done.  Looking at the current predictions in the future and thinking "that will never happen, they are too onerous" is too negative - those predictions are based on what has already happened looking backwards.

Now if the goal is to improve the current rating, and take a team for example from 41 to 43 within a certain time period - the math is pretty simple.  For those same expectations, they need to overperform by about 2 goals every time (on average).  If they can do that for a month or two - that's exactly what the rating would show.  And if they have injuries or other challenges and they underperform by 1 goal (on average) for a month or two, their rating should go from a 41 to a 40.  Whether it's done by ensuring the blowouts come in exactly on target, or a close game becomes a little less than a close game, the benefits (or penalties) would be the same.  The interesting part is by the end of that journey, the predictions will start to take into account the new performance, and then the team will need to perform at those new expectations going forward, to keep that improved rating.  



TeamDadJokes said:


> I think it’s also kind of always been my gripe with the website and now the program that teams can play in lower leagues and hide in bottom bracket tournaments and it inflates their rankings because of goal differential.


This is a bit inflammatory, and no matter how many times these insinuations are stated as fact - I haven't been able to find any actual examples that show this occurring.  I looked in Southwest, Texas, Florida, NY, IL, and I couldn't come up with a representative example of a highly ranked team (Top 25 nationally) that had a limited game history that was just against weak opponents in their own league where they had an inordinate amount of blowouts.  There may be ones out there, and I'm hoping that someone can point me in the right direction. What teams or leagues are you referring to? But in this thread - Solar (ECRL and ECNL) are both counter examples that show this not to be true.  There is a ton of game history outside their own leagues that ensures that the ratings assigned take into account all sorts of competition, which both help and hurt from time to time depending on the opponent.

A cynic might say that Slammers RL are guilty of what you're accusing others of doing.  Undefeated in league, 3 goals against them all year, yet the team isn't chasing enough worthwhile opponents to actually test their mettle in tournaments where they have a reasonable chance to lose.  How many of these talented girls should be on an ECNL team instead once reaching 2009G?  



TeamDadJokes said:


> I’m very familiar with how the ratings work, one higher rated team has a predictive value and another has their predictive value and that difference is goal differential. But a 2010 RL team rated 35 is predicted to lose to the top 2014 team. I can’t imagine a group of 8 year olds beating on 12 year olds.


There is a well-respected club near me that runs their youngers 1 year up all the way through U12 for their top team, and they are quite successful.  In some tournaments they are entered 2 years up.  Turns out that a very good 2013 team can in fact embarrass an average (or weaker) 2011 team.  Watching a bunch of tiny sprites fly around the field against a bunch of larger but often slower and less talented players, can be fun to watch.  Once kids get much older than this though, it starts to become a safety concern and the size/strength differences can't be ignored forever.  I'm with you, 8 year olds playing 12 year olds would be a bit of a stretch.  And validating whether a "35" at 2014 is exactly the same as a "35" at 2010, isn't something that can probably be confirmed in the real world.  The cross-play from age group to age group to age group is just too far a chain of results to ensure that there isn't drift between the rating scales of the two teams.  So it's a bit of a moot point.  We don't know whether the 35's mean the same in that comparison, and while we can debate it - it can never be settled authoritatively.



TeamDadJokes said:


> I think there should be some type of cap for rating (wins, losses, goal scored, goals against, age, and difficulty of bracket)


You, and I, and probably most people other than Mark and any of his team members/helpers, have almost no idea about what goes in to the algorithm(s) - other than it's related to goals scored in prior games.  The types of tweaking, caps, weightings, timings, and all of the other manipulations that can be done to past data to see if it better predicts future data is exactly what Mark has been doing for years.  And continues to do in this app.  What would you do if you had a system with millions of games, and had the chance to run countless models on the data to see how well different factors and operations can be applied to better predict game results (that have already happened)?  All of the hypotheses that one could come up with ("weight last months result 1/3 less than this months, or weight it 1/2 less."  "Drop results older than 6 months to .3 weighting vs. .2 weighting"  "Refactor goal differential so 5 goal differences are only slightly higher than 4 goal differences to minimize blowout effect") are the types of things that you get to optimize for when you have the data.  And all of that was massaged over time at YSR, but now is even more possible with the app.  Just look at the predictions - there is now an estimate for what the score is likely to be.  There are percentages given for chance of win / tie / loss.  These don't come from a random number generator - they are provided as the back end of a ton of past data on team performance.  

Is any of it ever going to be smart enough to predict the future with no variation - of course not.  The real world doesn't work like that, for reasons that are obvious to all.  But the griping about a simplistic algorithm or bad results feels off-base - the griping instead should be if the predictions turn out to be off or unusable on a regular basis.  If someone has a better way of looking at team data on their own and predicting future performance more effectively than this - prove it to yourself!  Use the data you have, look at the upcoming games, and document your predictions.  If it turns out that the app isn't any better than what's possible without - save the $10 and don't give it a second thought.


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> A cynic might say that Slammers RL are guilty of what you're accusing others of doing.  Undefeated in league, 3 goals against them all year, yet the team isn't chasing enough worthwhile opponents to actually test their mettle in tournaments where they have a reasonable chance to lose.  How many of these talented girls should be on an ECNL team instead once reaching 2009G?


You have to remember slammers had 2 ECNL teams and 2 ECRL teams per age group. These are the girls who didn’t get picked for either ECNL teams. So there’s no sandbagging on this one, just a lot of talent at slammers and not enough appeal for players to go elsewhere. Team did win Surf Cup and as the 3rd Slammers team was placed in their appropriate bracket. Games were competitive in the subsequent games including the Beach match that was a 1-4 loss. Even though this team has had closer games when they played previously against each other, but I digress

As for Solar RL, I think there’s plenty of data to show they should drop off with 4 losses to teams rated significantly lower than them and a series of underperforming match outcomes yet they remain very highly ranked as an RL team. But either way, time will have everything play out and stabilize.

We’re looking at a transition year moving into 11v11 and some teams are not reflective of their current team because of that transition as well as roster changes that normally come with moving to 11v11 and new leagues.

I don’t know how much historical data weighs versus current results, but there’s teams that are stacked high because of their matches from nearly 2 years ago (slammers included). What I’d like to know is, when we are rating teams, are we scoring them based off what their rating was at the time they played versus what their rating is now?

An example is Slammers McCarty Black was highly rated (top 13 in SoCal, top 25 Ca) when it was 9v9, but that team no longer has that roster (95% of the team went to NL/RL teams). So naturally their ranking drops, but at the time they played higher rated teams, is the algorithm accounting for their rating at that time and not the current rating? Because I’m seeing the matches between that team and the current team showing as a deduction in points even though at that time, the predictive value probably would not have changed either team’s points value.

Don’t get it twisted, I’m a supporter of Mark and what he’s doing, but these are questions that people are asking


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> I don’t know how much historical data weighs versus current results, but there’s teams that are stacked high because of their matches from nearly 2 years ago (slammers included). What I’d like to know is, when we are rating teams, are we scoring them based off what their rating was at the time they played versus what their rating is now?
> 
> An example is Slammers McCarty Black was highly rated (top 13 in SoCal, top 25 Ca) when it was 9v9, but that team no longer has that roster (95% of the team went to NL/RL teams). So naturally their ranking drops, but at the time they played higher rated teams, is the algorithm accounting for their rating at that time and not the current rating? Because I’m seeing the matches between that team and the current team showing as a deduction in points even though at that time, the predictive value probably would not have changed either team’s points value.


All of the game history is assigned to a team entity, and the rating of that team entity is affected by every game as it happens.  To see what ratings are affecting a team, it's just the listing of all games on the team page itself, with the links to the source data included at the bottom.  From the app's perspective, a team is just that - a collection of game data.  As game data is added (either 1 game by 1 game over time), or in bulk (as a new data source from a tournament or even a league is assigned to a team entity), that new data is used to adjust the team rating.  There is no concept of roster changes, 9v9 vs 11v11, or anything else.  When a new game result is added, all that is necessary is to tie this team entity to the opponent team entity, and to see if the score of the match is greater or lesser than the predicted score of the match, which is the difference in ratings between the two entities.  If the opponent isn't rated at all, it seems to sit there dormant and not affecting anything until or if the opponent ever does become rated.  That's really it.  

Where some of the opaqueness comes in, is trying to figure out what happens when old data is assigned to a new team.  If I realize that last year's team X in this tournament is actually the same as team XX that I'm looking at, and I pull in 4 games from February 2022, how does that affect current rating?  Basically - is it looking at a comparison of what the rating was for both opponents back in February 2022, accounting for that new data, then coming back to present day to calculate current rating.  Or, is this new data applied to current rating, but unweighted very significantly because it's 8 month old data anyway.  My hunch is that it's the latter.  Otherwise - there would have to be a daily history of existing rating kept for each team forever - and that seems unlikely from a data management standpoint.  Especially since we know the app is calculating ratings in real time as soon as new data is added; there isn't a daily batch process.  We know that there is some history kept for the rankings graphs to be plotted - but it's unclear whether the rankings are calculated once and then static, or if those rankings are variable due to past ratings being variable.  

What I do feel is that older game data may matter less than one would think.  We had significant team history issues in the migration from GotSoccer to GotSport.  Team history between several teams in the club got munged together and then actually assigned to the wrong team when entered into GotSport.  It went on long enough before being noticed, that by the time it was, it actually become easier to just leave them as is (initially wrong) than try and sort everything back out.  This not only hosed GotSport rankings for awhile, but affected the team's ratings in YSR (and now the app).  But after a few months of new and accurate game data, the rating for our teams shot up significantly (5 points in less than a year).  To move it 1 point, it really can be done in just a few weeks of games.  A team that performs at level X for 6 months just isn't going to be at the rating X+2 because of what happened a year ago or earlier, the ratings are much more fluid.

I'm trying to make sure I'm looking at the same team you are referring to.  Is it CDA Slammers North McCarty Black Whittier?  It looks like one that is playing in the SOCAL Fall League, most recently losing to Chelsea SC Langsford 1-2 on 10/30?  It looks like it's now 115 in state.  The game results look pretty spot on going back all the way to May, I count 32 games - of which 28 of them they performed as expected.  In 4 of them they underperformed.  You have to go all the way back to January before finding any games where they overperformed enough to affect their rating much positively.  But back to present day - they currently show a 38.07, and that's the rating that would be used to predict a game tomorrow, regardless of any history.

I see that there is a "CDA Slammers Whittier McCarty Drop" team entity in the Unranked teams area.  It has game data assigned to it as recent as February 22, at the SoCal State Cup G2010 Super.  Earlier data includes the 2021 Silverlakes Fall Showcase, the 2021 Players Challenge Cup, and some more.  None of this game data is being used to rank any team at all right now, as it's not assigned to any team that has played in the last 7 months.  Does this represent the older team you're referring to?


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> All of the game history is assigned to a team entity, and the rating of that team entity is affected by every game as it happens.  To see what ratings are affecting a team, it's just the listing of all games on the team page itself, with the links to the source data included at the bottom.  From the app's perspective, a team is just that - a collection of game data.  As game data is added (either 1 game by 1 game over time), or in bulk (as a new data source from a tournament or even a league is assigned to a team entity), that new data is used to adjust the team rating.  There is no concept of roster changes, 9v9 vs 11v11, or anything else.  When a new game result is added, all that is necessary is to tie this team entity to the opponent team entity, and to see if the score of the match is greater or lesser than the predicted score of the match, which is the difference in ratings between the two entities.  If the opponent isn't rated at all, it seems to sit there dormant and not affecting anything until or if the opponent ever does become rated.  That's really it.
> 
> Where some of the opaqueness comes in, is trying to figure out what happens when old data is assigned to a new team.  If I realize that last year's team X in this tournament is actually the same as team XX that I'm looking at, and I pull in 4 games from February 2022, how does that affect current rating?  Basically - is it looking at a comparison of what the rating was for both opponents back in February 2022, accounting for that new data, then coming back to present day to calculate current rating.  Or, is this new data applied to current rating, but unweighted very significantly because it's 8 month old data anyway.  My hunch is that it's the latter.  Otherwise - there would have to be a daily history of existing rating kept for each team forever - and that seems unlikely from a data management standpoint.  Especially since we know the app is calculating ratings in real time as soon as new data is added; there isn't a daily batch process.  We know that there is some history kept for the rankings graphs to be plotted - but it's unclear whether the rankings are calculated once and then static, or if those rankings are variable due to past ratings being variable.
> 
> ...


Yes, that team dissolved right after their last match with Beach FC Ayala. Coach pulled the team out from state cup for a variety of factors. That group of girls became the Arsenal ECRL team for a few months before there was a coaching change and the team dissolved there after with girls now spread amongst various teams (Blues NL, Slammers RL, Pats NL, Arsenal NL). However, that team name lives on as his flight 2 team, McCarty White is now using the McCarty Black team name (signifying that this is the top team from the branch).

The Arsenal 2011 Pre-ECNL team is now the 2010 Arsenal ECRL team (and despite trying to merge these two, they continue to be separated).

So back to the prior results, you can see the Slammers North team performed very well until February 2022 at which point that roster was no longer the same (only 1 player from that roster is still on the team). But when it was performing, the rating was higher. You can see the same type of thing happen with other teams (Legends ECNL was ranked lower than McCarty’s team at that time, so those victories improved Legends ranking when they were played, however, if you look today, they are actually bringing Legends ranking down.


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 2, 2022)

Here’s a screenshot of what the rankings were in January 2022 back when McCarty Black had its original performing roster that was higher ranked than the Legends ECNL team at that time. Today, Legends is being penalized for their 3-1 victory over that Slammers Whittier Black team


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 2, 2022)

I'm looking at the Legends FC ECNL history that you attached, and I see what you mean about some of the games back in the April 2021 time period.  They show beating the Slammers North McCarty Black Whittier team (3-1), and a draw (1-1).  At the time, if Legends were higher, it would have helped their rating.  But now the ratings are reversed, and it looks like that loss is instead hurting their rating.  It's a fair question - and it's not impolite to ask Mark directly for his thoughts on how this is accounted for or dealt with.  My hunch is that it simply doesn't matter that much, as games older than 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, get discounted in weighting so much that the effect on the present rating is minimal if it's even noticeable.  

This is testable, if you are curious and want to do it with a team you have permission to tweak ratings for.  Just delete all source data from over a year back, and see how much (if any) the rating changes.  Any change will show immediately; ratings are calculated on the fly when source data is added/removed.  Then just add that source data back to the team so there is a fuller game history once again.


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 2, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> I'm looking at the Legends FC ECNL history that you attached, and I see what you mean about some of the games back in the April 2021 time period.  They show beating the Slammers North McCarty Black Whittier team (3-1), and a draw (1-1).  At the time, if Legends were higher, it would have helped their rating.  But now the ratings are reversed, and it looks like that loss is instead hurting their rating.  It's a fair question - and it's not impolite to ask Mark directly for his thoughts on how this is accounted for or dealt with.  My hunch is that it simply doesn't matter that much, as games older than 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, get discounted in weighting so much that the effect on the present rating is minimal if it's even noticeable.
> 
> This is testable, if you are curious and want to do it with a team you have permission to tweak ratings for.  Just delete all source data from over a year back, and see how much (if any) the rating changes.  Any change will show immediately; ratings are calculated on the fly when source data is added/removed.  Then just add that source data back to the team so there is a fuller game history once again.


Mark’s a busy guy. I try not to bother him unless it’s necessary. I’m sure he gets plenty of emails. He’s usually very prompt when I’ve reached out in the past, and I’m sure he’ll iron this all out.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 9, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> The Arsenal 2011 Pre-ECNL team is now the 2010 Arsenal ECRL team (and despite trying to merge these two, they continue to be separated).


This should be fixable with a few clicks (by either of us, or anybody else who can confirm the team info). I can find the Arsenal 2011 Pre-ECNL team.

 

But I can't find anything that looks like a 2010 Arsenal ECRL team.  There is nothing named "Arsenal" in 2010 Girls in either Ranked or Unranked teams that looks to be what you are describing.  Can you share any link to where they are currently playing, or any other info that might help troubleshoot why they aren't showing up?


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 9, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> This should be fixable with a few clicks (by either of us, or anybody else who can confirm the team info). I can find the Arsenal 2011 Pre-ECNL team.
> 
> View attachment 15026 View attachment 15025
> 
> But I can't find anything that looks like a 2010 Arsenal ECRL team.  There is nothing named "Arsenal" in 2010 Girls in either Ranked or Unranked teams that looks to be what you are describing.  Can you share any link to where they are currently playing, or any other info that might help troubleshoot why they aren't showing up?


Sporting California USA = Arsenal


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 9, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> Sporting California USA = Arsenal


Right - I went through every one of those.



None of them have played a game since August 2021.  All appear to be dormant teams.  Is that correct?  If so - who cares?  Any team who hasn't played a game in 7 months becomes unranked anyway.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 9, 2022)

Wait, I understand what you mean now.  Apologies.  The team isn't called Arsenal at all now.  Is this the team?  And it should have the Arsenal 2011 team data tied to it?


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 9, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> Wait, I understand what you mean now.  Apologies.  The team isn't called Arsenal at all now.  Is this the team?  And it should have the Arsenal 2011 team data tied to it?
> 
> View attachment 15028


Yes sir


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 9, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> Yes sir


OK - here are the two sets of game sources:

2011 team:  

2010 team:  

The 2011 team played as recently as 6/22.  The 2010 team played as far back as 3/22 on their own.  It looks like these teams both entered the 2022 Classic as two separate teams (5/21 - 5/22).  From this data alone, it shows that one team didn't cleanly become the other.  Some of their game history is clearly unique.  If nothing changes going forward, the 2011 version of the team will just eventually time out of the rankings, and the 2010 version that is continuing to play, will continue to have games added to their own game history.   If there are individual events (like for example, the Swallows Cup 2022 from 6/18) that were really the 2010 team and should be pulled over - it's just a click to do so.  For what it's worth, it looks like they were playing against exclusively 2010 teams in that tournament (Slammers 2010 twice, Pateadores 2010, CFA).


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## TeamDadJokes (Nov 9, 2022)

RandomSoccerFan said:


> OK - here are the two sets of game sources:
> 
> 2011 team:  View attachment 15030
> 
> ...


The team from April / May left. But according to Mark, the team name keeps the game. It doesn’t follow the roster even though it’s 100% a different team with different coaches AG versus DO’b. The 2010 RL was taking over by the 2011 pre-ECNL team I think around august was when they started playing, maybe late July. This is why you don’t see any SoCal games from this season for that 2011 team.


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## RandomSoccerFan (Nov 10, 2022)

TeamDadJokes said:


> The team from April / May left. But according to Mark, the team name keeps the game. It doesn’t follow the roster even though it’s 100% a different team with different coaches AG versus DO’b. The 2010 RL was taking over by the 2011 pre-ECNL team I think around august was when they started playing, maybe late July. This is why you don’t see any SoCal games from this season for that 2011 team.


A team is just a collection of game results, that represent the performance of that team.  When teams change, the results can stay with the changed name, or they can stay with the original name, especially if that original team gets rebooted with the same name.  But in general - as long as people are happy that the results are tied to who people can agree the team actually *is*, any option that represents that best is fine.  Here's info from the FAQ for the app.

*



			Team History Results
		
Click to expand...

*


> _
> The coach wants to keep the black team history together and we fixed the team history to reflect that. This comes down to the philosophical question "what is a team?". Is it the group of players or the name of the team? Our policy is that if all concerned are happy then we will move history from an old team to a new team. However, if anyone objects then the team name defines the team and results with the same name will be grouped together._




Say that the Springfield Purple Puppies all pick up and move to a new club, the Smallville Raging Butterflies.  There is no issue with the Butterflies adding (and keeping) all of the game results from the Puppies.  Or they can decide not to, if they feel the team has changed enough (whether just roster, by name, or whatever).  If the Springfield club reboots the team name, and has a new group of Purple Puppies, it's OK for them to add (or keep) the game results that were assigned to the previous incarnation.  That would be OK as well.   All Mark is saying is that if there is contention, and both the new Raging Butterflies, and the new/old Purple Puppies have any issue with how things are being assigned, the "winner" of that contention is the one with the same name, and the Purple Puppies would keep game history that was named Purple Puppies.

Since in Arsenal/Sporting's case, according to the info here, the whole team moved over, the game data shows the Coach is there, and the old team did appear to stop playing and become the new team - there is no "old" team to complain about results being assigned properly.  So based on the info you provided, I moved the results over to Sporting California USA RL (2010 Girls).  



Turns out that this helped that team's rating/ranking quite a bit; they immediately jumped from 112th in state to 88th in state (for 2010G).  



Their most recent performance in RL appears to be underperforming as compared to that new rating (judged by the 4 "red" games, no green, and rest black), so over time the rating will continue to adjust to whatever the current performance is as new games are added each weekend.


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## flynight2 (Dec 11, 2022)

Thanks for the tip. Seems like you need to subscribe to get the full rankings.


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