Youth Soccer Rankings ?

JRV said:
Why are the rankings in the app so much different than the rankings in gotsoccer?
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Forgot to add one point, that may sometimes be glossed over when discussing these differences. If there is a bad data for a team (wrong scores entered, team data incorrect, scores connected to wrong team, etc.), GotSport charges $25 customer service fee per instance to change a single piece of data. So in practice - it's a FU charge to go away, and so nothing is ever changed or corrected unless GS does it themselves through some other process. In just our own club, there are a number of problems with team data in GS with duplicate team entities actually being the same team, and that will likely stay that way until the end of time. As a contrast, SR data is pulled in electronically, but its accuracy is then crowd-sourced, and anyone with a sub ($10/year) can correct anything they see that is wrong in the app, whether their own team, another team in their club, or something else in a bracket they are familiar with, whatever.
 
Zeke said:
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.
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if MLS Next doesn’t publicly report, then SR isn’t useful (for that tier of teams), because no one knows all those scores. My original point is that self reporting isn’t reliable enough.
TopesWin said:
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.
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This.
And I’ve found it more helpful for tournaments like man city to look into teams from out of state.
RandomSoccerFan said:
Forgot to add one point, that may sometimes be glossed over when discussing these differences. If there is a bad data for a team (wrong scores entered, team data incorrect, scores connected to wrong team, etc.), GotSport charges $25 customer service fee per instance to change a single piece of data. So in practice - it's a FU charge to go away, and so nothing is ever changed or corrected unless GS does it themselves through some other process. In just our own club, there are a number of problems with team data in GS with duplicate team entities actually being the same team, and that will likely stay that way until the end of time. As a contrast, SR data is pulled in electronically, but its accuracy is then crowd-sourced, and anyone with a sub ($10/year) can correct anything they see that is wrong in the app, whether their own team, another team in their club, or something else in a bracket they are familiar with, whatever.
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some clubs have different teams (under the same team name) play different opposing teams from the same league.

For example, 2010 A team will play the better league 2010 teams and the B team (usually 2011s) will play weaker 2010 teams. Games played under same 2010 team name

that messes up the rankings
 
maestroFRSM said:
if MLS Next doesn’t publicly report, then SR isn’t useful (for that tier of teams), because no one knows all those scores. My original point is that self reporting isn’t reliable enough.
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It's as useful as the data. If there is no data - eventually it won't be useful for teams that have no data. I think there's a very good chance that the scores will become available soon, and I'm also somewhat more optimistic that while self-reporting is clearly sub-optimal, if it ever has a chance of being workable - it would be at the highest levels such as MLS, rather than if it were happening to a much more casual league. We'll see soon enough.

maestroFRSM said:
some clubs have different teams (under the same team name) play different opposing teams from the same league.

For example, 2010 A team will play the better league 2010 teams and the B team (usually 2011s) will play weaker 2010 teams. Games played under same 2010 team name

that messes up the rankings
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Yes - that's my point. Any team who wants their game history and therefore their rating to be as close to reality as possible, has the opportunity to confirm it and clean it up if things are missing or miscategorized. The software does a good job of assigning the games to the appropriate team entity, and where it can't, it's usually not that long before someone comes along to merge/fix as needed if it is sitting in unrated.

Your example is correct - if there are teams that are loosey-goosey with their names and their rosters, and play a bunch of different teams as the exact same name with no differentiation - the ratings in SR, GS, or anywhere else are going to be tied to the game history of that combined team. It does seem like the more common data complication is instead that teams use random and changing names as they enter various tournaments, appending the coach's name, or abbreviating the club name differently, or stating "pool team", etc. In that case those team entities do stay on their own and may never get a rating, unless that version of the team does have enough matches in their history alone to be rated (typically 6-8 in previous 6 months).

At this amount of data (millions of games, thousands and thousands of clubs, teams, etc.), it's a given that there will be data quality concerns. But the stats of how accurate it is *right now* already are taking that into account. It's reporting the reality of one ranked team entity vs. another ranked team entity, as stored in the database today. If someone could snap their fingers and immediately all game data was 100% correct and assigned to the correct team entity that fully represented the actual players on the field that day - it's possible that the prediction accuracy, and therefore rating accuracy, would go up somewhat. But it's debatable how much better it could actually get from where it is today, it's a classic case of diminishing returns at some point. Any team that wants their rating to be accurate as possible has the tools to do it easily. Any team that doesn't care isn't significantly impacted, and the aggregate ratings/rankings aren't affected much for others.
 
“Yes - that's my point. Any team who wants their game history and therefore their rating to be as close to reality as possible, has the opportunity to confirm it and clean it up if things are missing or miscategorized.

Any team that wants their rating to be accurate as possible has the tools to do it easily.”


how would you “ fix” things for the situation I gave?
 
Have you played with the app directly? If you don't have a sub, you can't get to the data sources to see how it all fits together and can be individually corrected. It's $10 for a year, and there's a 30-day free trial, so if interested - you can see if it's useful for a few weeks before cancelling without any cost. But here are the app screens that point to team data. Let's take this example team:

surf1.jpg

That team has a couple of different events/tournaments. Scrolling down, here are all of their games:

surf2.jpg

If you click over to Sources, here's the actual data sources that they were coming from:

surf3.jpg


You can see how the names aren't the same. The first two were probably automatically matched, while the 3rd was potentially linked together manually by someone, as they had used a slightly different name for that 1 tournament.

Here's that specific tournament:

surf4.jpg


If it turns out that I was familiar with the team - and knew that it actually wasn't them - I could delete that data source by hitting the trash bin next to the invalid source:

surf5.jpg

and then hit Done in the top right, and the team data would then be corrected. That's really it. You generally can't enter your own data in - the only option is manipulating the data that SR has pulled in via these game sources, and adding/deleting them to the team entity as appropriate. If I knew there was another tournament out there with the team named somewhat different, I could hit Add Sources, search for something close to that other team name, and if it was the right data I could add it to this team entity and then save it the same way.

The workaround being proposed for MLS is interesting, and I do wonder about how the UI will accommodate creating some new data entries, and how that will be monitored over time. But I have no doubt that in this same manner - if there is bad or even malicious data, it will be able to be removed/changed by the next person that comes across it.

Now your specific example does have its conundrums. If a team really is named "The Super Bunny Puppies Academy Premier Elite", and they use that exact same name in everything they enter - but in some games it's made up the team A starting powerhouses, but in some games it's entirely made of the scrubs that are most worried about splinters from the bench - it could be hard to separate them. The first fix is to have the club registrar and/or the team manager realize that using the exact same name for essentially different teams is a bad idea for a host of reasons, two of them having a consistent game history and having objective measures about how good the team actually is - all helpful when deciding what brackets to enter for each event, and even how to place the team next season. If the team does start naming more consistently interpretable as they enter events/tournaments, and now there are "The Super Bunny Puppies Academy Premier Elite Red" and "The Super Bunny Puppies Academy Premier Elite Blue", once their first data starts showing up in SR - you can then pull in the correct events from the prior combined name into the appropriate new team entity. For most individual tournament info, this would work fine. Though it may be tedious to figure out which is which, it's doable, and it's the very foreseeable result of using the same team name to represent multiple things at once. The sticking point that isn't resolvable, is if all of some particular data is in a single source, and that single source is actually representing multiple versions of the team, with the same name, in the same source. For example if this was in league - which typically only has a single data source entry for all games for the season (but still often split by fall/winter/spring/etc.), there's no way to say let's apply games 1,3,5 in league to the Red team and games 2,4,6 to the Blue team.

The good news, is that if a team has been sharing an identical team name across non identical teams, and at some point decides that they don't want to do that anymore - starting with a new more intelligible team name for GS/SR whatever, will still result in a rating showing up for the new team name in only 6 or 7 games. One of our teams had to do this just this year, when there were some name swaps in the club from X to Y. The Y team had no rating - but within 4 weeks - they not only had a rating - but it was identical within a tenth of a point to their rating from all of the prior game data in X. It's a surprisingly small amount of rated games that can be relied upon for the rating to show up.

If you do have a specific example team that you're aware of, and wondering if it is possible to clean it up or not - PM me and if you want I'll send you screenshots of exactly what the data looks like as is, and potentially recommend how I'd fix it if I knew more about the team itself.
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
Have you played with the app directly? If you don't have a sub, you can't get to the data sources to see how it all fits together and can be individually corrected. It's $10 for a year, and there's a 30-day free trial, so if interested - you can see if it's useful for a few weeks before cancelling without any cost. But here are the app screens that point to team data. Let's take this example team:

View attachment 18300

That team has a couple of different events/tournaments. Scrolling down, here are all of their games:

View attachment 18299

If you click over to Sources, here's the actual data sources that they were coming from:

View attachment 18298


You can see how the names aren't the same. The first two were probably automatically matched, while the 3rd was potentially linked together manually by someone, as they had used a slightly different name for that 1 tournament.

Here's that specific tournament:

View attachment 18297


If it turns out that I was familiar with the team - and knew that it actually wasn't them - I could delete that data source by hitting the trash bin next to the invalid source:

View attachment 18301

and then hit Done in the top right, and the team data would then be corrected. That's really it. You generally can't enter your own data in - the only option is manipulating the data that SR has pulled in via these game sources, and adding/deleting them to the team entity as appropriate. If I knew there was another tournament out there with the team named somewhat different, I could hit Add Sources, search for something close to that other team name, and if it was the right data I could add it to this team entity and then save it the same way.

The workaround being proposed for MLS is interesting, and I do wonder about how the UI will accommodate creating some new data entries, and how that will be monitored over time. But I have no doubt that in this same manner - if there is bad or even malicious data, it will be able to be removed/changed by the next person that comes across it.

Now your specific example does have its conundrums. If a team really is named "The Super Bunny Puppies Academy Premier Elite", and they use that exact same name in everything they enter - but in some games it's made up the team A starting powerhouses, but in some games it's entirely made of the scrubs that are most worried about splinters from the bench - it could be hard to separate them. The first fix is to have the club registrar and/or the team manager realize that using the exact same name for essentially different teams is a bad idea for a host of reasons, two of them having a consistent game history and having objective measures about how good the team actually is - all helpful when deciding what brackets to enter for each event, and even how to place the team next season. If the team does start naming more consistently interpretable as they enter events/tournaments, and now there are "The Super Bunny Puppies Academy Premier Elite Red" and "The Super Bunny Puppies Academy Premier Elite Blue", once their first data starts showing up in SR - you can then pull in the correct events from the prior combined name into the appropriate new team entity. For most individual tournament info, this would work fine. Though it may be tedious to figure out which is which, it's doable, and it's the very foreseeable result of using the same team name to represent multiple things at once. The sticking point that isn't resolvable, is if all of some particular data is in a single source, and that single source is actually representing multiple versions of the team, with the same name, in the same source. For example if this was in league - which typically only has a single data source entry for all games for the season (but still often split by fall/winter/spring/etc.), there's no way to say let's apply games 1,3,5 in league to the Red team and games 2,4,6 to the Blue team.

The good news, is that if a team has been sharing an identical team name across non identical teams, and at some point decides that they don't want to do that anymore - starting with a new more intelligible team name for GS/SR whatever, will still result in a rating showing up for the new team name in only 6 or 7 games. One of our teams had to do this just this year, when there were some name swaps in the club from X to Y. The Y team had no rating - but within 4 weeks - they not only had a rating - but it was identical within a tenth of a point to their rating from all of the prior game data in X. It's a surprisingly small amount of rated games that can be relied upon for the rating to show up.

If you do have a specific example team that you're aware of, and wondering if it is possible to clean it up or not - PM me and if you want I'll send you screenshots of exactly what the data looks like as is, and potentially recommend how I'd fix it if I knew more about the team itself.
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yes, because you can’t parse out individual games, and because a few of the teams will interchange teams under the same name, SR can be inaccurate in these situations

Would be nice if we could delete certain games we know don’t reflect the overall quality of the team
 
maestroFRSM said:
yes, because you can’t parse out individual games, and because a few of the teams will interchange teams under the same name, SR can be inaccurate in these situations

Would be nice if we could delete certain games we know don’t reflect the overall quality of the team
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I'm not sure it would be nice at all, it would be an open invitation for people with an unquestionable bias to decide which games were relevant and which weren't. I wonder how they might choose that...

With teams that are being silly with their naming and how they register, the possible effects are real - but they may be less significant than you'd think. Pick a specific team that you're thinking of that has these issues - not a hypothetical, an actual, real team that you think is at risk of an incorrect rating due to it. You can then look in SR for that particular team entity, and review the last 15 - 20 games, and see how accurate (or inaccurate), the team's rating has been to predict their performance. It may be surprising how spot-on the results are. If you don't have a trial and can't do it yourself - DM me and I'll send you screenshots.
 
As of today, it looks like the 2023-2024 results from MLS Next have been pulled in to SR. Some of the teams need to be merged, but by and large all is well. Not sure if this is temporary or a more permanent fix, but all is moving in the right direction.
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
As of today, it looks like the 2023-2024 results from MLS Next have been pulled in to SR. Some of the teams need to be merged, but by and large all is well. Not sure if this is temporary or a more permanent fix, but all is moving in the right direction.
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Modular 11 had the results up for a couple of days and then pulled them down. I suspect these updates will remain static until the the results are posted again...
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
I'm not sure it would be nice at all, it would be an open invitation for people with an unquestionable bias to decide which games were relevant and which weren't. I wonder how they might choose that...

With teams that are being silly with their naming and how they register, the possible effects are real - but they may be less significant than you'd think. Pick a specific team that you're thinking of that has these issues - not a hypothetical, an actual, real team that you think is at risk of an incorrect rating due to it. You can then look in SR for that particular team entity, and review the last 15 - 20 games, and see how accurate (or inaccurate), the team's rating has been to predict their performance. It may be surprising how spot-on the results are. If you don't have a trial and can't do it yourself - DM me and I'll send you screenshots.
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I have picked out a real team and SR was inaccurate
Again because 2 different rosters competed under the same name in the same league
 
maestroFRSM said:
I have picked out a real team and SR was inaccurate
Again because 2 different rosters competed under the same name in the same league
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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?
 
maestroFRSM said:
I have picked out a real team and SR was inaccurate
Again because 2 different rosters competed under the same name in the same league
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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.
 
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.
 
Arguing in favor of poorly attended or poorly bracketed tournaments is lunacy. We all have a limited number of weekends - why waste them on tournaments that care so little for their customers that they don't bracket properly. Every team should want to play teams as good or better than them - but they would want to have a chance. At some point the tournament ranking will be more automated (either in SR, or elsewhere), and it will be easier to see which tournaments are doing this well when a club or team is considering their options.
 
RandomSoccerFan said:
Arguing in favor of poorly attended or poorly bracketed tournaments is lunacy. We all have a limited number of weekends - why waste them on tournaments that care so little for their customers that they don't bracket properly. Every team should want to play teams as good or better than them - but they would want to have a chance. At some point the tournament ranking will be more automated (either in SR, or elsewhere), and it will be easier to see which tournaments are doing this well when a club or team is considering their options.
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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.

In the example I provided the 3 top tier teams will most likely beat the lower level teams + end up facing the better teams during the tournamant.

Usually nothing changes, the higher ranked teams end up the winners.

Is playing a couple of games where 9 times out of 10 a certain team will win a bad thing? Not really, it's an easy confidence booster for the better team and an eye opener for the worse team.

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.
 
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