Youth Soccer Rankings ?

I don't think it's just that Surf Cup bracketed teams well this year. They also have a large amount of teams to bracket.

Many of the smaller tournamants have to play the teams that signed up. Meaning if you only have 5 teams signed up to play in your tournament + 3 are tier one and 2 are tier three it wouldn't make sense to not just play what's available even if you know that several teams are going to get shelled.

Personally I like tournamants with a wide variety of teams playing. Yes, I know some of the teams are going to get worked. But, when they play better teams they'll get a better understanding about what it takes to play at the highest level. Also it sets up for Cinderella team situations which is fun.
I’ve watched several games where one team is predicted to win by 7 or 8 points. It’s not a wonderful cinderella story where the plucky upstarts pull of a stunning upset by reaching deep and finding something they didn’t know they had. That’s a Hallmark movie.

The real game is a smackdown where the stronger team puts the weaker team in their place, followed by a hackfest because the losing team is frustrated.
 
It makes sense because sometimes teams from different leagues or different geographies are ranked higher or lower because they never play each other or teams that play each other.

You continue to misunderstand both the relative accuracy and the usefulness of ratings for teams from different geographies that have no common opponents.

As long as the tournamant isn't gifting better teams a path the finals or specifically making it impossible for certain teams to advance its fine.

Fair, but why do it for any reason. Good teams don't need an easy game where they are learning nothing. Bad teams don't need to be shellacked to understand that they are bad.
 
Again - you haven't posted the team or told anyone about the problem. Which club or team manager is signing up two different rosters under the same name in the same league? How would you resolve this?
Our DOC determines all that. I don’t think he (rightly) gives a damn about SR
 
There's no way SR can account for this. It's an automated process. If two results are reported for the same team (club / age group / level / coach) then they will be considered the same team.
Agree, pointing out real world limitations not asking for a solution
 
You can admit that your club is iffy at any point. Not caring about team names is typical in low-rent or poorly managed clubs. Playing multiple teams under the same name is not an SR issue - it's just bad management.
 
How do you handle a team that plays a year up in the tournament? Do they get bonus points for beating a one year older team?
 
You can admit that your club is iffy at any point. Not caring about team names is typical in low-rent or poorly managed clubs. Playing multiple teams under the same name is not an SR issue - it's just bad management.
Nope. Again. Clueless. Low-rent? The teams, including from this example, are at the very top of MLS Next standings.

I’m not faulting SR, or saying this is an SR issue, just pointing out a real world limitation.

For you to make wild assumptions about the quality of a team or DOC is hilarious- that’s why I suggest you stick to the math algorithms behind SR.
 
Nope. Again. Clueless. Low-rent? The teams, including from this example, are at the very top of MLS Next standings.

I’m not faulting SR, or saying this is an SR issue, just pointing out a real world limitation.

For you to make wild assumptions about the quality of a team or DOC is hilarious- that’s why I suggest you stick to the math algorithms behind SR.

So which MLS Next team has incorrect ratings due to this? We can all look at them together and confirm one way or the other.
 
How do you handle a team that plays a year up in the tournament? Do they get bonus points for beating a one year older team?

Ratings system are going to vary here. For SR - it doesn't matter a whit whether the team is 2012, 2010, or 2008. The only thing that matters is the team entity itself. It's potentially possible that a team that enters as a different age might have to be brought together manually by someone who knows the team background - but if the name is identical regardless of the age switch it might not be necessary. A team will be ranked higher (but will have the same, identical rating), whether they are classified as a younger age or an older age. The age brackets generally have a 3-5 average rating score between them as you go up the brackets.

Others are as seamless, while others completely segregate the age groups and there really isn't a way to compare/contrast.
 
Nope. Again. Clueless. Low-rent? The teams, including from this example, are at the very top of MLS Next standings.

I’m not faulting SR, or saying this is an SR issue, just pointing out a real world limitation.

For you to make wild assumptions about the quality of a team or DOC is hilarious- that’s why I suggest you stick to the math algorithms behind SR.
What you’re really saying is that someone in the top half of MLS Next doesn’t need SR to find matches. Word of mouth is just fine for a tiny universe. Very few teams play at that level, and 95% of them are already in his league. So he keeps track of the 20-30 teams which matter, and ignores the rest.

That system breaks down as soon as the DOC’s club needs to flight a tournament with mid level brackets. I’d be very surprised if the DOC flights an 800 team tournament just based on his gut. More likely, he turns it over to someone else who uses league records, SR, and so on.
 
Here are the top 10 for 2007B MLS Next. For most of them, their rating matches very closely with their performance. For 2 or 3, they have a significant number of games that they are both overperforming and underperforming. Maybe it's because of rosters, maybe it's due to the team being up and down, maybe there's no actual explanation. But for most - either they are naming the team properly or it doesn't really matter.

MLS 2007B.png
 
So which MLS Next team has incorrect ratings due to this? We can all look at them together and confirm one way or the other.
We've covered this before. LAFC is the example I'm most familiar with. They will often play entire teams or even all the teams on a given matchday up against weaker clubs to make the games more competitive. This will skew the results.
 
I think you're probably right, but it doesn't matter much from a ratings/ranking standpoint. They are still the #6 in the country (3rd highest in MLS N) out of over 3,000 teams. The spreadsheet shows that they vary somewhat more than anyone else in the top 10 for MLS N- but anyone who expects them to vary so widely that it will be an easy game is just kidding themselves. The Strikers have a similar profile.
 
Strikers' issue is different. They've lost players permanently and their ranking is adjusting. LAFC jumps back and forth between two teams.
 
Yep, that's fair. Just this MLS Next season alone - Strikers has 5 underperforms and 2 overperforms, so their rating is on a somewhat downward trend. For LAFC - they are looking at 4 overperforms and 2 underperforms against the calculated rating. Yes - they might swap some or all of the roster entirely to make up a team - but the rating for the team entity as a whole isn't far off, and is slightly improving. Would be interesting to match up the overperform/underperform games with the specific roster for those games, to see if there really is any alignment.
 
For LAFC - they are looking at 4 overperforms and 2 underperforms against the calculated rating. Yes - they might swap some or all of the roster entirely to make up a team - but the rating for the team entity as a whole isn't far off, and is slightly improving.
Except that they did the same last year, so we're comparing their hybrid teams year over year.
Would be interesting to match up the overperform/underperform games with the specific roster for those games, to see if there really is any alignment.
Yeah, you'd have to do something like that, but then you'd have to know which roster they're bringing to a specific game to predict results.

Of course, as soon as you do something like this, you could apply it to all the teams and then see which rosters / individual players lead to which results. I don't think we want that...
 
I think there may be too much emphasis on which kids were actually on the field, compared to a team's rating. For the former - of course it matters for a variety of reasons. For the latter - it turns out to matter very little in aggregate. The ratings are useful for a team to measure themselves, and for an opposing team to understand the strength of who they are meeting on the pitch. It turns out that even in the case of LAFC - the rating is quite predictive, and their ranking is where it should be - even if someone knows that the actual kids might be a year down, might be actual year, or might be a hybrid of sorts.
 
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