I tried something like this back when my kids were playing and it was just becoming possible to get tournament scores and league standings online. I never went further than preparing a sketch of our upcoming opponents for my kids' coaches. I got the feeling they didn't know what to do with the information. I lost interest after a time, but the online data is much richer now and all it would take is someone willing to put in the time and skillful in net programming.
Youth Soccer Rankings ?
- Thread starter dawson
- Start date
I tried something like this back when my kids were playing and it was just becoming possible to get tournament scores and league standings online. I never went further than preparing a sketch of our upcoming opponents for my kids' coaches. I got the feeling they didn't know what to do with the information. I lost interest after a time, but the online data is much richer now and all it would take is someone willing to put in the time and skillful in net programming.
@Technician72, do I hear a calling and maybe a business opportunity? I can handle sales & marketing if you or someone will run the back office. I came hear for two reasons @Dominic when my girl was 9. First reason, I heard some dads were talking smack about my little #7 and her combo team from Legends North and Legends Temecula. My first day here some dad was making fun of #7 because she cried all the time and got the refs on her side, especially in the box and in close games, PK will win it
She was the smallest on the field but had one of the bigger competitive hearts. Second, I heard about the rankings. I only stayed in my lane back then, the U9 thread. I was pissed off and shocked that grown men would make fun of my dd for crying. I never went off topic and I never read about any olders or college or politics. Things are a little nicer regarding making fun of other people's kids except for you know who. I'm for free speech Dom so whatever. Thanks for all the great times. You need rankings big time bro, moo 
No Beach? Legends? That Cpanel is old bro.
I hear those were some great times. My wife's father coached a team in Walnut/Diamond Bar in early 80s. Santos FC or something like that. Hard core soccer Dom. I tell Grandpa about the parents in 2022 and he laughs. He told me he might have one or two dads looking for extra edge outside of what their boy did on the field. He told me he had one parent meeting before the first practice to tell the parents the rules. His biggest rule was play time complaining. He nipped that in the butt at first meeting. He told the parents in his way that if you want play time, go to AYSO. He's the coach and he plays to win first, no ifs and or butts. Plus, it's his way or the highway regarding where he plays your kid. If you dont like it, go to another team before our first practice or go to A-SO. The other time he talked to parents was at the team banquet after the season was over. He was in high demand but he came with high demands.I went way back with some of those names.
RandomSoccerFan
GOLD
As mentioned a few times above - I agree, calculating the ratings/scores and having it readable to interpret relative team strength is not terribly complicated once someone has the data. Sure - there are weighting options on how much to value newer games vs. older games, minimum number of games to be included as a team, and a few more, but that's all tweakable. Getting the data from gotsport/gotsoccer/all the random tournament sites, within a few days of it being posted up, is the secret sauce to anything like this at scale. But even that isn't necessarily is technically complicated as one might think at first glance. There is a ton of software available to handle the data acquisition by screen scraping websites, and get it into a usable data format. Check out lists like this. Once configured, it likely only requires tweaking for a site once someone screams that it's not working. Then the other issue is as also been described above, how to represent that this team is actually this team across platforms where they are described differently. youthsoccerrankings had put together a pretty good system for that, where anyone could both merge teams that were the same programmatically, and could also report where a team's data was being shown incorrectly, by removing a data source. We only saw the front end, and not necessarily how it was handled on the backend, but it appeared that much of it was automated - and not just sending a message to a person via email for them to fix manually. That allows it to scale to thousands and thousands of teams, and eventually millions of games. Yes - that does allow for data pollution as people might unintentionally (or even intentionally) miscategorize teams, or add/remove incorrect data sources - but you can deal with it only when someone screams, rather than be in the middle of every transaction.
I dont know why, say, soccer.com doesn't recreate this and use it as a tool to get tens of thousands of over-invested parents perusing their site on a weekly basis.
Wouldn't think it would take all that many extra cleat sales to pay for it and then some.
Or why doesn't Academy or Dicks Sporting Goods do this for every youth sport for the same reasons?
(soccer.com, you are welcome and please send future commissions to timmyh)
Wouldn't think it would take all that many extra cleat sales to pay for it and then some.
Or why doesn't Academy or Dicks Sporting Goods do this for every youth sport for the same reasons?
(soccer.com, you are welcome and please send future commissions to timmyh)
The most complete, honest, and thorough rating system is probably the NCAA RPI rating system for men's and women's soccer. But even that thas its critics. That would be a good model to work from.
Last edited:
RPI is a weighted sum of win percentages for you, your opponents, and their opponents. (WP + 2x OWP + OOWP)/4
This makes sense in a college context, where schools control their own schedules, and some prefer to load up on lightweights. The punching bag teams end up with low win percentages, so you drag down your RPI if you put them on your schedule.
Not so great for youth sports. What happens when you move up a flight or play up a year? Your win percentage drops. But the win percentage of your opponents is about the same: the U13 bracket has no more and no fewer total wins than the U14 bracket.
So, WP falls, but the other two components stay level. Your RPI will fall significantly every time you move up, and rise significantly every time you move down.
One of the common myths of the RPI system is that some schools load their schedule with opponents they believe will have a winning record so even if they lose they will get a bump in the RPI. If you follow the math through, it's pretty much a wash. The component of RPI that this your own win-loss record has only about 20 factors, while the oppoents' win/loss record has about 20x20 or about 400 factors. Over a season's schedule it tends toward .500 anyway. The OOWP has even a weaker result. The worst thing that can happen to a school's RPI is to lose to a "weaker" opponent.
Where some schools get an advantage is if they play in a conference that has a good WTL record against non-conference opponents. That bumps up the points they get from their conference games.
And after that mathematicians have had their say at the end of the season, the NCAA throws in a few adjustments, things like losing at home to team in the bottom of the RPI rankings (negative) or winning on the road to a team with a strong RPI ranking (positive).
For a fuller examination of this issue, read gauchodan's posts on bigsoccer.com "College and amateur soccer" pagre.
RandomSoccerFan
GOLD
The question I had when I first found youthsoccerrankings, was why doesn't gotsoccer/gotsport implement similar functionality. The rankings on gotsoccer/gotsport are essentially pointless and unusable - yet that same data pulled into youthsoccerrankings gave actionable information. In that vein, I wonder if one of the reasons for the shutdown was more legal in nature - gotsoccer/gotsport got tired of their site data being duplicated elsewhere, and on the main page of the site it had a graph literally showing how much better quality the rankings were in predicting a winner.
RandomSoccerFan
GOLD
web.archive.org lets us go back and see things like this:
The archive is showing something from 2021. If I remember correctly, the predictive power was still about the same - but the game coverage was much better before it went dark, something like 70% coverage for YSR, and 40% for Gotsoccer.
The archive is showing something from 2021. If I remember correctly, the predictive power was still about the same - but the game coverage was much better before it went dark, something like 70% coverage for YSR, and 40% for Gotsoccer.
I still don't understand why got soccer uses such a bad algorithm. Any decent database team could implement a public domain ranking algorithm in a few weeks.
Instead, they publish a trash ranking and put their name on it. All it does is weaken the got soccer brand.
Rankings are nice and I think that YSR rankings follow a logical formula and are reasonable.
However , I think just as important is
the recording of game history for so many
teams covering so many different leagues , EA , MLS next , ECNL , NPL , ECRL and most tournaments, and leagues across the nation .
There are a multitude of uses that a record of a teams history helps fulfill. To name a few :
Plain old entertainment.
Coaches , parents, players can get an idea of how strong an upcoming opponent and over a number of games can get a feeling for whether their team is improving.
Choosing a new team .
Choosing a new coach.
Choosing a tournament.
Teams setting goals .
Although , I’m not saying choosing a
Coach, team or a club should be based only on their historical win loss record but it should be one of the factors to consider .
I’d be happy with just the historical records
of as many teams as possible across the nation. Which YSR covered significantly better then Got Soccer or any other similar organization. And since the software of YSR probably still exists where so many links to team games are already established I would hope somehow , someone will take it over and perhaps solicit ads and or charge a small fee to make it worth while and cover costs such as this forum does .
If I was tasked with coming up with a new rankings site, I would start with a top 10 in Socal and NoCal for all the ages. I dont really care about all the other States. Texas will have a team or two that will want to travel to California to take on the best. If you build it, they will travel here, not the other way around.
Nfarr67291
BRONZE
Below is the email I received from Mark who ran the site.
Maybe someone could start one of those online petitions .
Evidently from the above post it would be directed to Sports Engine . If Mark is willing to take it back there’s a path to making it work and most businesses will respond to public pressure if its strong enough.
And I fail to see how if Mark used ads and a small fee to users it would not cover any costs involved. Heck a lot of tournaments use YSR because its easy to use to do seeding and is more accurate then any other rankings system. So maybe with some awareness they would help with paying a small reasonable fee I really don’t see any other seeding system that is as accurate and fair as YSR .
And if he has time maybe Dominic could give some direction on how to secure ads and setup fees . He’s certainly done a great job with the forum he runs . ( of course I don’t know Dominic and maybe he just doesn’t have the time which would certainly be understandable ! )
Just some thoughts .