Youth Soccer Rankings ?
- Thread starter dawson
- Start date
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
I imagine it's pretty straightforward - if the game scores are available electronically to the public, it will almost certainly be pulled in to SR. If they are limited from public view and require specific access - it's certainly possible they will never get to SR, so the teams would eventually drop out of the ratings entirely.
I think that would hurt the SR, but also MLS Next's reputation. I don't know whether they care about rankings at all, but I do think that as the teams move up, it helps tilt people towards choosing MLS Next over ECNL.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
I think that's true - but it's even more practical than that IMO. What is so secretive about MLS Next game scores that they choose not to publish them publicly? It would be a sign of weakness rather than strength. We'll see soon enough.
Except that the not-published scores are only MLS v MLS. Any scores vs. other teams are still published (because they happen in tournaments).
But I suspect this has to do more with dealmaking and exclusivity than public vs. private.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
Mark's update today adds some features. On each team page, there is now a rating for schedule strength. This shows the aggregate ranking/rating of all opponents the team has seen in the past year. It's another data point to assess whether teams are generally playing teams that are stronger, weaker, or of similar competitive levels over the past year. There is an updated Club page, which now has a bar graph showing the total number of teams in the chosen club separated by age group / gender. Both the Team pages and Club pages now have tabs at the top, making it less needed to do a ton of scrolling which was previously needed to get to the different genders and to the game data sources. And the 2016's have been officially released, so those rankings/ratings are fully visible after a soft launch a short while back.
I don’t know about the app. In girls 2010 seeing those GA teams ranked so high while they are losing to nobody’s while ECNL southwest teams continue to beat eachother up and are ranked lower makes no sense to me. Just looking at what the 2010 southwest teams did to all these top ranked teams in their states during ECNL playoffs last year proves how misleading these rankings really are at least in that age bracket. How is Tophat still ranked so high? It’s hilarious to me.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
If you're actually interested in understanding how accurate (or inaccurate) ratings systems can be, it's not a hunch or a feeling - it can be tied directly to the results and measured/verified mathematically. This post in this same thread a few pages back explains exactly how, it's probably worth the quick read.
There are ~3300 2010G teams in the US with enough recent matches against other rated teams to be rated. A higher rated team will beat another rated team ~82% of the time. Does that mean that every ranking from 1 to 3300 is exactly correct and will predict who wins the next game with 100% certainty? Nope. But believing that anything can predict the future with 100% accuracy is silly - and debunking a predictive engine for not being 100% accurate is equally silly.
Looking at 2010G - out of those 3300 teams, if you focus on just the top 50, it's down to just the top 1.5% of teams across the country. Of those 50, 35 of them are ECNL, 11 of them are GA, and 4 are other. Cutting it down to the top 20 - 17 of them are ECNL, 3 of them are GA. All of these teams are quite good, by any reasonable definition.
The one that you brought up (TH 2010G) is quite an outlier, and was showing #2 in the country for awhile, before starting to move down as their more recent results aren't at the same level as their previous season. It's been discussed quite a bit here as the results in the app (and on the field) stand out. Last season they put up an incredible record in GA, were the class of the league nationally, went undefeated in the GA Champions League Finals, and went undefeated in the GA Summer Showcase Playoffs as recently as June. Their rating reflected those game results. And looking at their game history in the app for all of 2023 - it shows that their rating predicted their game results quite closely - there were only 4 games where they significantly overperformed their rating, and zero games where they significantly underperformed their rating - this is shown by those game results highlighted in either red or green. However - since they restarted play in August, they have significantly underperformed in 4 out of 6 games, gone 2-3-1, with their only convincing blowout win against a team ranked over #500 in the country. With the recent addition to show calculated schedule strength data showing even more insight, it confirmed that TH's schedule over the past year was the 54th strongest in the country - meaning that their rating is supported by convincingly and thoroughly beating up on teams that for the most part they outclassed. There are other teams in the top 10 that have a similar profile. Real Colorado's schedule was 31st in country, Solar's was 25th, and even the #1 ranked team MVLA's schedule was 24th. But the remaining top 10 teams all do show that they also had the top 10 hardest schedule in the country while earning a similar rating.
Given all that, it's understandable that people would want TH 2010G to play head-to-head with some of the other current top 10 teams to see if they really are (were?) that good, or if their rating that they have earned is misleading and would not predict their performance against the teams this board is familiar with. Some people here believe that it would be a validation of the strength of this particular GA team and would surprise the masses here. Others are pretty confident that wouldn't be the case.
There are ~3300 2010G teams in the US with enough recent matches against other rated teams to be rated. A higher rated team will beat another rated team ~82% of the time. Does that mean that every ranking from 1 to 3300 is exactly correct and will predict who wins the next game with 100% certainty? Nope. But believing that anything can predict the future with 100% accuracy is silly - and debunking a predictive engine for not being 100% accurate is equally silly.
Looking at 2010G - out of those 3300 teams, if you focus on just the top 50, it's down to just the top 1.5% of teams across the country. Of those 50, 35 of them are ECNL, 11 of them are GA, and 4 are other. Cutting it down to the top 20 - 17 of them are ECNL, 3 of them are GA. All of these teams are quite good, by any reasonable definition.
The one that you brought up (TH 2010G) is quite an outlier, and was showing #2 in the country for awhile, before starting to move down as their more recent results aren't at the same level as their previous season. It's been discussed quite a bit here as the results in the app (and on the field) stand out. Last season they put up an incredible record in GA, were the class of the league nationally, went undefeated in the GA Champions League Finals, and went undefeated in the GA Summer Showcase Playoffs as recently as June. Their rating reflected those game results. And looking at their game history in the app for all of 2023 - it shows that their rating predicted their game results quite closely - there were only 4 games where they significantly overperformed their rating, and zero games where they significantly underperformed their rating - this is shown by those game results highlighted in either red or green. However - since they restarted play in August, they have significantly underperformed in 4 out of 6 games, gone 2-3-1, with their only convincing blowout win against a team ranked over #500 in the country. With the recent addition to show calculated schedule strength data showing even more insight, it confirmed that TH's schedule over the past year was the 54th strongest in the country - meaning that their rating is supported by convincingly and thoroughly beating up on teams that for the most part they outclassed. There are other teams in the top 10 that have a similar profile. Real Colorado's schedule was 31st in country, Solar's was 25th, and even the #1 ranked team MVLA's schedule was 24th. But the remaining top 10 teams all do show that they also had the top 10 hardest schedule in the country while earning a similar rating.
Given all that, it's understandable that people would want TH 2010G to play head-to-head with some of the other current top 10 teams to see if they really are (were?) that good, or if their rating that they have earned is misleading and would not predict their performance against the teams this board is familiar with. Some people here believe that it would be a validation of the strength of this particular GA team and would surprise the masses here. Others are pretty confident that wouldn't be the case.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
It looks like SR is implementing a stop-gap procedure to deal with MLS Next dragging their feet about publishing any results so far this season. When I opened the app yesterday, there was a pop-up message explaining that some MLS Next teams were going to start dropping out of the ratings over time as their existing results age out, because MLS Next's website continues to say "coming soon" for results. If you are connected in some way to an MLS team, Mark can open up a feature in the app for people to self-report scores for their own team or even their entire bracket if they have access. My hunch is that the average # of SR users per MLS Next team is > 1, so I believe it's unlikely that scores won't be reported at some point - given that unwelcome outcome for their ratings if they aren't. Hopefully the website gets sorted at some point and this kludge becomes unnecessary.
maestroFRSM
SILVER
Don’t think people care enough to consistently report
Even so, it’ll be spotty and unreliable
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
You might be right - I guess we'll see over time. Even for those who profess to not care about it a whit - if the scores for their kid's teams show up incorrectly and disadvantage the rating/ranking for them, I'd bet it's unlikely that 100% of the parents, let alone all of the club's leadership and/or support staff would all be happy to ignore and leave that bad data. It doesn't take everyone to care about it, it doesn't take most to care about it, it doesn't even take a few to care about it - it just takes 1.
maestroFRSM
SILVER
100% of our team doesn’t care
What’s the point?
We know who the best teams are
The point is to make it easier to set up good scrimmages.
It's hard to do that if you don't know the scores from previous games.
rainbow_unicorn
PREMIER
Cmon, let's be real. It's 100% for parent pride.
Maybe for some but it's really a process to help parents navigate the truth to youth soccer. A lot of coaches and clubs tends to sell the wins but they might not exist or they exist based on very weak opponents. It's not the ONLY information parents should use to access whether a club is appropriate for their kids, but it's one tool in the toolbox because you should go watch teams play several games before making decisions.
The more truthful information we have available to parents, the better.
Got soccer only looks at got soccer.
the app pulls data from all sources including TGS, and various other leagues, demosphere and whatever app surf cup uses and more.
Got soccer also gives weight to certain tournaments which can boost other teams got soccer points where as the algorithm used in the soccer rankings app takes a variety of data based off of match results to assign each team a score that is used as a predictive value that allows for a goal differential to be forecasted should 2 teams from any age group and gender were to play against each other.
gotsoccer ranks teams by whether they go to gotsoccer events, and how well they do when there. It is not even remotely accurate.
SR adds up all results, weighted by strength of opponent. It is mostly accurate. One limit is that, if you’re looking at the best team in a weak region, it will overestimate their strength.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
I had the exact same question for my wife quite awhile back when she shared info with me about YSR, which she had initially heard about from another parent, whose kid was starting to travel the country for MLS N. What could it be possibly doing with the game data that is heavily concentrated already on GotSoccer/GotSport, and calculating things differently to show completely different - and much more accurate - rankings and ratings. I was highly skeptical.
With some curiosity, I played with it a bit, and realized that it was in fact very accurate for all of the teams we are most familiar with, and predicted game results with uncanny accuracy. Over time I spent more free time playing with the team data itself, and merging/fixing teams in the area to improve the data quality over all. When it went down for good as a website - it did seem like something significant was lost, but Mark and team rebuilt it as an app and it has since far surpassed what it was in prior generations. If interested in exactly how it works, and how its accuracy can be measured and tracked over time - here's a more detailed post from earlier in this thread.
But to jump to the end - SR is now expected to pick the right winner for a game between two rated teams, with 82% accuracy. GotSport rankings are at 55% - 60%, only slightly better than a coinflip. For the top 100 teams, GotSport does a little better, in the 70% range (probably due to the tournament bonus points system), but it's still miles behind SR. For context, if any of these systems were at 50%, they shouldn't call themselves rating/ranking systems, and should rebrand themselves as random number generators.
Yes, some people certainly do believe that - but it is quite hard to prove it one way or another. On the one side, you have this, where game data analysis on the system itself, limited only to games between teams in different states - shows that it is still essentially as accurate as games between teams in the same state. And on the other side, you now have the app providing data on the relative strength of the schedule teams have played over the past year, and there are examples of some very highly rated teams, who have played some relatively weaker schedules when arriving at their current rating. At some point - until the teams are on the same pitch on opposing sides, there are fundamental limits to how accurate future predictions can be. But these are pretty darned good. One thing to also keep in mind is that even the back-end algorithms aren't necessarily static and unchanging - they are tweaked over time to continue to optimize that predictability number. All of the weighting for how long game data should count for, how much does it decline over time, how much to weight goal differences, how to discount larger goal differences, and probably quite a few more parameters - those are the levers that can be tweaked to optimize the results.
I'd say 80% parent pride and 10% for setting up good scrimmages and 10% for determining if your next opponent is someone you're going to need to pass the ball around 10 times before shooting with your weak foot only, or whether you should prep your kid mentally for the beat down of his life. It can also be used by parents to see if the coach that is recruiting their kid is selling snake oil. There's no doubt it serves useful functions in addition to just being a massive ego stroke for parents. More so for youngers versus olders, where most everyone already knows everyone.