rainbow_unicorn
PREMIER
Why does it matter? Does it make a difference if your team is ranked higher or lower? Rankings is fun, but it's 100% parent ego.
How’s the 2025-2026 season going?
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RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
Not my system. Just a happy user. Many things would make the system (any system) more predictive, including tracking weather, field conditions, rosters, even coaching strategies, and plenty of other variables that professional sports bettors (and betting systems) use as a matter of course. But I'm not sure weighting Showcases much differently than other games would be that significant. Of course everyone would agree the outcomes of the games are much less important - but they still provide reasonable data about how teams are performing. I'm not sure discounting them much would make much of a difference in using game outcomes to predict future game outcomes. It's the same with pre-season games. They mean nothing for the record, or anything else, but they are still a reasonably good indicator of how teams perform.
A lot of it comes down to what a rating should represent. Everyone agrees it should rank the "best" team first, and every subsequent team lower, all the way down. But defining "best" is up for much debate. What SR is rating is likelihood of winning a game vs. another rated team. The more games it can pick the correct winner, the higher its predictivity is. It optimizes everything, to make and keep predictivity as high as it can be (and it's pretty good at it). The team that is predicted to beat every other team, is by its definition the best team. But this isn't actually how many sports work. The team that wins the big tournament is the "best" team, even if a "better" team lost in the semis. The winner of the World Series or Super Bowl is the "best" team, even if they didn't have nearly the highest regular season record, and wouldn't be predicted to beat all of the other teams. In our world, the national champion of the highest league can legitimately call themselves the best team, but they may or may not be ranked #1 in SR (or even top 10).
A lot of it comes down to what a rating should represent. Everyone agrees it should rank the "best" team first, and every subsequent team lower, all the way down. But defining "best" is up for much debate. What SR is rating is likelihood of winning a game vs. another rated team. The more games it can pick the correct winner, the higher its predictivity is. It optimizes everything, to make and keep predictivity as high as it can be (and it's pretty good at it). The team that is predicted to beat every other team, is by its definition the best team. But this isn't actually how many sports work. The team that wins the big tournament is the "best" team, even if a "better" team lost in the semis. The winner of the World Series or Super Bowl is the "best" team, even if they didn't have nearly the highest regular season record, and wouldn't be predicted to beat all of the other teams. In our world, the national champion of the highest league can legitimately call themselves the best team, but they may or may not be ranked #1 in SR (or even top 10).
It is a form of measurement. As a competitor, it is a “non” or “less“ subjective way of measuring performance. Not sure what you mean by “matter”. A lot of things you find important to you doesn’t “matter” to me. What matters is subjective. Everything I do that has importance to me matters, and I want to continually improve upon and that is way measuring is important. Until soccer becomes professional, this is all fun and games. So yes, it is fun, but there are a lot more than just parents that look at the rankings. Highly competitive people will understand this. If you are not, you won’t. It may just be different strokes for different folks.
The advantage of the ranking app is it does one thing pretty well. If you start weighting results it wont be as good (depending on your perspective) at the one thing it does well. Also how do you define the weight of certain games? How would you place equivalent levels of weight to the same type of event run by different leagues? What if the results of the same type of event is used in one league for results and not used in others to do the same? What if one league does a certain type of event more than another? You want certain events (showvases) to have less weight in defining ranking. Other people will want other events (playoffs) to have more weight. What about adding a "power" ranking to certain regional leagues like what college does? Maybe certain tournaments should have more weight then others. As you can see you might get a "better" result by weighting results but the problem is you add in subjectivity and perspective. Subjectivity will open the door to exploitation. On top of everything else it would be a massive amount of work to maintain an event weight definition. Also the definition of weight will change over time. What this means is that the value of data will be low because the definition of weight added will be inconsistent.
As I wrote previously a better to get what you want (less weight for showcases) is for leagues to only present win/lose or 1-0/0-1 for showcase games. Why show the number of goals scored when showcase results arent supposed to matter? You can keep goals scored data internal and maybe present at the end of the season. Theres likely reasons to have correct data provided.
rainbow_unicorn
PREMIER
Nobody other than parents are looking at the rankings. College coaches don't care about nuanced rankings...they generally know what clubs and leagues produce the best players.
I think college coaches look at the rankings app for a general understanding of a club or teams ability. Its free and easy to use so why not? However they likely dont care if teams are 1st or 50th its more to understand the level of play players on XYZ team are used to and capable of.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
I'm not sure this would result in "better" ratings for the specific teams either. If team A is 2 goals better than team B, and demolishes them in a showcase 3-0, changing the reported score to 1-0 slightly harms the rating of team A (and helps team B). Making everything only a goal apart when the teams might be more than a goal apart, is a gift to the lesser teams and a penalty to the better teams. As always, report every game score as played, and it will continue to predict future game results, as played. If the game truly doesn't matter and a team doesn't want the scores to count - don't play a recorded game.
unfortunately some coaches have not caught onto this yet and are still trying to win these games or using the games to try new formations or lineups instead of using them to showcase the players in their strongest positions to help them get recruited.
I doubt they look much at SR, but you need more than club and league.
Most clubs have strong years and weak years. You guys have clubs where bad year means "didn't go to Virginia." We get a little more variety.