Club Team Tiers

When I see this and I know for sure they're the same teams, I add the games/sources manually...
That’s the thing I am not 100% sure. When you add missing sources, it asks you if you are 100% sure. I am only 90% sure.
It does look suspicious when the former Pats NB became “unranked”. How can a team with 2 years worth of games become “unranked”?
 
Now it looks like the team has done amazingly well, almost suspiciously well, in the Surf cup - showing 3 green overperforms. It might be that the same team just did well, or the team entities might really not be the same, and a different roster is now cleaning up in tournaments.
I doubt there is a different/better roster at NB. If anything they should have lost players to the Pats pre ecnl team nearby and gotten worse.
But this just shows you can improve your ranking by getting rid of old bad results.
 
That’s the thing I am not 100% sure. When you add missing sources, it asks you if you are 100% sure. I am only 90% sure.
It does look suspicious when the former Pats NB became “unranked”. How can a team with 2 years worth of games become “unranked”?

Any/every team that has no recent results attached to it is unranked. Every single team entity becomes unranked at about 6 months without current data. It's not suspicious. When new data comes in and it's not attached to a team, and it alone isn't sufficient to support a ranking, it is also unranked. At some point, any team entity that has no results attached to it for something like 18 months - 2 yrs (I don't know the specifics), that team entity doesn't even show up in the unranked list - even if it is still in the underlying database. Other teams are still in unranked not because they may not have recent enough data, but because they don't have *enough* recent enough data for a rating to be relevant. They have to have enough games in that time frame vs. other rated teams. It's not a lot, it seems like 5 - 8 are often more than enough.

To improve the reliability of the ratings, the more data that can be moved from unranked over to an already ranked team, the better. The vast majority of this is going to happen automatically. This still leaves a huge portion of potential effort for anyone with the local knowledge of where unranked data should be - to put it exactly where it should be. And when you are searching for unranked data to add to a specific team, it pulls from not only all of the shown unranked data, but even seasons/data from prior that no longer show in the unranked lists. So if you search for data on Raging Purple Butterflies 2007G, it may pull up potential matches for that name going back quite a few seasons.
 
But this just shows you can improve your ranking by getting rid of old bad results.
So a team that plays better, help me here, is rated better, and that is shocking? Current results are always going to be the most relevant, and the age of the results in the history affects its value towards the rating at a pretty significant velocity. Anything older than 6 months really doesn't seem to move the needle much at all. And if a team is progressively improving at a significant rate, i.e. much more than the average one would expect as they age - yes - if they become a *new* team every 6 months, the rating of that new team (once it has sufficient games), would be expected to be somewhat better than if that team kept the prior 6 months history where they were performing noticeably worse.

But keep in mind - all of this is to predict whether that specific team, at this very point in time, would be expected to beat another specific team, at this very point in time. Only one prediction is the "right" one, what is the expected strength of the team right now. Yes - if they have overperformed in the last few games, and they can wipe the old history and still have enough to show as ranked, it might be a higher rating than if they included all of their game history. But overall - the more game history (up to a point) assigned to a team, the more likely the prediction of the team's strength to be accurate.
 
So a team that plays better, help me here, is rated better, and that is shocking? Current results are always going to be the most relevant, and the age of the results in the history affects its value towards the rating at a pretty significant velocity. Anything older than 6 months really doesn't seem to move the needle much at all. And if a team is progressively improving at a significant rate, i.e. much more than the average one would expect as they age - yes - if they become a *new* team every 6 months, the rating of that new team (once it has sufficient games), would be expected to be somewhat better than if that team kept the prior 6 months history where they were performing noticeably worse.

But keep in mind - all of this is to predict whether that specific team, at this very point in time, would be expected to beat another specific team, at this very point in time. Only one prediction is the "right" one, what is the expected strength of the team right now. Yes - if they have overperformed in the last few games, and they can wipe the old history and still have enough to show as ranked, it might be a higher rating than if they included all of their game history. But overall - the more game history (up to a point) assigned to a team, the more likely the prediction of the team's strength to be accurate.
Regarding rankings app sometimes having trouble identify teams if the team name is changed, doesn’t every team has a gotsport number? If so, why doesn’t rankings app use the got sports number to identify teams?
 
Regarding rankings app sometimes having trouble identify teams if the team name is changed, doesn’t every team has a gotsport number? If so, why doesn’t rankings app use the got sports number to identify teams?
Because the data sources don't use that number. There's nothing to link that ID to.
 
Regarding rankings app sometimes having trouble identify teams if the team name is changed, doesn’t every team has a gotsport number? If so, why doesn’t rankings app use the got sports number to identify teams?

If the team entity is on GotSport, yes, they have a GotSport number. However - the linkage of that number to the right team is more screwed up than you might imagine. It used to rely on those numbers very significantly, but it turned out that it was doing more harm than good in many cases. GotSport charges $25 per change for anyone to actually fix a piece of game or team data that they notice is wrong - so nobody does, and the data gets pretty bad over time. So that GotSport number is certainly pulled in as a data point any time that it exists, which is pretty much every time if it's from a GotSport page itself. It's one of the ways that SR can figure out its predictivity vs GS - just run a query comparing gotsport numbers & ratings and see what actual results are (it's not good). It would make everyone's life easier (including the app developers) if there was some trustable ID. But with the fragmentation of US soccer at the moment, it's not likely in the foreseeable future. SR is probably the best place right now that actually lists/catalogs all competitive soccer teams with recent results.
 
Against my better judgment, I figured I'd share another example of this bug that I saw this afternoon. Here is one new team entity, with 3 data sources brought together manually (Davis Legacy 07/06B White). When brought together, the ratings/calcs look weird. #1 defense in nation, #13 overall, but #212 offense, and only #624 in schedule strength. I'm pretty confident that when I look back at this same team a day or two from now, everything will be much more believable and better representative of the data sources. For the umpteenth time in this thread - I don't believe these possible errors amount to much at all, as they are quickly normalized - but it would be even better if we couldn't cause them to happen occasionally in the first place.

View attachment 22816View attachment 22815

As we'd hope, this same team no longer looks strange; here's the current page for it (#63 in state, and correspondingly believable numbers across all of the rest).

current one:
davis3.jpg

initial strange one:
davis1.jpg
 
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