Youth Soccer Rankings ?

Probably because they do not want to be associated with the results. If things go well, they claim it; goes bad, they hide it. The higher performing teams are usually consistent in identifing the team and coach clearly. I've noticed a trend that a lot of GA and E64 teams leave their league designation off the team names at the smaller, local tournaments. Leaves everyone wondering if it's the clubs GA team? The NPL team, Flight 1??? Then there is the affiliates rabbit hole. Sometimes they let you know there is a distinction, other times, there are 6 "Legends" or "Rebels" teams in one age group bracket and you can't tell where any of them are from. :confused:

US Soccer should require a Team ID # that must be used. Got Soccer has some sort of ID number, but this new app doesn't.
 
US Soccer should require a Team ID # that must be used. Got Soccer has some sort of ID number, but this new app doesn't.
Agreed, but... sometimes the teams that go to tournaments are legitimately not the same as the ones that play in league. There's a lot of shuffling to fill a tournament roster because not everyone can go - especially for the Thanksgiving and Easter tournaments. You'll see kids from lower and younger (and sometimes higher) teams from the same club guesting. And sometimes just purely random kids. My son has done this a lot over the years.
 
US Soccer should require a Team ID # that must be used. Got Soccer has some sort of ID number, but this new app doesn't.
Some coaches use a team name to indicate what level they are even if the entire roster has turned over. For example,. Legends will rank its team FC, Gold, Black and White from strongest to lowest. The roster and coaches on those teams may switch titles from year to year. In some instances, and entire roster may leave (such as going from 9v9 to 11v11) and essentially its a new team but with the same team title. That team should not get the ranking of the old team and its roster that are no longer present (I'm specifically talking about scenarios like where 10 of the 12 on the roster have moved on).
 
For the love of god, why do coaches enter the teams into tournaments with different names?

Probably because they do not want to be associated with the results. If things go well, they claim it; goes bad, they hide it. The higher performing teams are usually consistent in identifing the team and coach clearly. I've noticed a trend that a lot of GA and E64 teams leave their league designation off the team names at the smaller, local tournaments. Leaves everyone wondering if it's the clubs GA team? The NPL team, Flight 1??? Then there is the affiliates rabbit hole. Sometimes they let you know there is a distinction, other times, there are 6 "Legends" or "Rebels" teams in one age group bracket and you can't tell where any of them are from. :confused:

More often than not it's the Team Manager, not the coach, doing the tournament registrations. Usually the higher performing teams have managers that are more aware and/or experienced and/or detailed oriented enough to keep it consistent. Most tournament platforms identify the coach with the team so it can be figured out, it just takes a little more effort.
 
Soccer drama on the field has made it to this rankings app! A progressively rougher game this weekend kept escalating without much ref control and ended with a fistfight between two players. The field was stormed by parents pushing and screaming at each other, and the ref called the game with just a few minutes left. Multiple red cards, and dispute filed with the league, which will almost certainly be in our favor.

Noticed this week that our ratings kept getting messed up (by somebody incorrectly adding data sources for game results). I would revert them the next day, but the same problem repeated itself twice. The app owner investigated, and someone was intentionally and maliciously merging all the data into one team incorrectly to remove us from the ratings. That same user has primarily made edits for the club in question from this weekend. That user is now blocked from edits in the app.

I was hoping for the development of a web interface once again, which made it easier to interact with the data on a larger screen with a keyboard/mouse. But I can see the advantages of an App here from the development/maintenance side, especially for cases like this. The developer doesn't have to worry about managing accounts, authentication, or any other user-specific information - apple/google just issues a unique and anonymized ID that effectively ties a device to a user (and their subscription). When one of the ID's misbehaves, it can have its privileges curtailed. That same individual would need to sign up from a different phone - and pay for another subscription - to continue to misbehave. While that's certainly not impossible - it's much less likely than in the prior world, where anyone could edit the rankings on the website with no authentication, no cost, and no consequences.
 
Noticed this week that our ratings kept getting messed up (by somebody incorrectly adding data sources for game results). I would revert them the next day, but the same problem repeated itself twice. The app owner investigated, and someone was intentionally and maliciously merging all the data into one team incorrectly to remove us from the ratings. That same user has primarily made edits for the club in question from this weekend. That user is now blocked from edits in the app.

I was hoping for the development of a web interface once again, which made it easier to interact with the data on a larger screen with a keyboard/mouse. But I can see the advantages of an App here from the development/maintenance side, especially for cases like this. The
I wonder what these parents that create problems will do once their player is done with sports. Clearly they don’t have a life to go to these extremes of manipulating data. Call them out.
 
Latest app version for iOS has added some new features. Teams now have distinct ratings for offense & defense (as well as the existing overall rating), and Clubs are now ranked as well. From the Club page, it shows all the teams associated with it, along with individual ratings. It's unclear, to me at least, how the Club rating is calculated. It's clearly some aggregation of the ratings of the individual teams, but I don't know how it's weighted, or how unranked teams within the club affect or don't affect it.
 
Latest app version for iOS has added some new features. Teams now have distinct ratings for offense & defense (as well as the existing overall rating), and Clubs are now ranked as well. From the Club page, it shows all the teams associated with it, along with individual ratings. It's unclear, to me at least, how the Club rating is calculated. It's clearly some aggregation of the ratings of the individual teams, but I don't know how it's weighted, or how unranked teams within the club affect or don't affect it.
Ranking Clubs is VERY interesting...

Right now "the best" clubs in socal have created their own insulated leagues to insure wins (and losses) against predetermined opponents. This does not benefit players + specifically does benefit clubs because it allows them to control outcomes + make players that want to play at the highest levels jump through hoops.

Also most parents might know a single age group or two on either the boys or girls side but not the overall status of the club. This is why you end up with all the ECNL/GA/Next/bla/bla/bla pissing matches.

Showing which clubs consistently have wins across all age groups and genders puts DOCs + club presidents on the hot seat for performance.
 
Right now "the best" clubs in socal have created their own insulated leagues to insure wins (and losses) against predetermined opponents. This does not benefit players + specifically does benefit clubs because it allows them to control outcomes + make players that want to play at the highest levels jump through hoops.

As someone who isn't in the socal area (just a bit north of you folks), looking at the socal clubs is quite confusing. Many of what appear to be the top clubs have a billion teams with very similar names, making it very hard to figure out which team is which, and how to attribute particular results to the right team over time. If you look at many of the top individual teams, it's typically a single team that has a single data source that has had an amazing past 10 games, and no history past that. That's why ranking the club should normalize some of this, and weight all results of all teams in a way that is meaningful - but there are certainly many reasonable arguments about how to do that calculation in a variety of different ways.
 
As someone who isn't in the socal area (just a bit north of you folks), looking at the socal clubs is quite confusing. Many of what appear to be the top clubs have a billion teams with very similar names, making it very hard to figure out which team is which, and how to attribute particular results to the right team over time. If you look at many of the top individual teams, it's typically a single team that has a single data source that has had an amazing past 10 games, and no history past that. That's why ranking the club should normalize some of this, and weight all results of all teams in a way that is meaningful - but there are certainly many reasonable arguments about how to do that calculation in a variety of different ways.
I agree it's annoying. Once you're in the middle of it all everything "makes sense" if you want to call it that.

The groups that lose out by the way things are curently structured are players that never get a chance to compete at the highest level and clubs that also never get to play against the highest level teams.

What ends up happening is that clubs with access to highest levels of play simply recruit from everyone else that's boxed out. While this does produce a very limited set of high level players sometimes that group can be swayed by $$$. Also if everyone in socal just played each other youd end up with much more high level talent that what's currently produced.
 
OK, I have clarification on how the Club ratings are calculated. It's the average of the ratings of the top teams, as if two clubs playing each other all brought only their single best teams in each age group, then aggregated the scores to see who's on top. Any second or lower team in any age group should have no effect on a club's rating.

Knowing this - it looks like there is some weirdness in the data currently that doesn't seem to match this explanation, but I'm sure it will be ironed out over time as examples can be reviewed/corrected.
 
Youth Rankings are like a "box of chocolates... "never know what you're going too get:

Fun stats or whatever for parents but I rarely remember youth players mentioning or carrying on about rankings only that a team they where facing where past or current tournaments or league champions.

Youth soccer can be unpredictable at times, past doesn't predict the future and ratings don't play the games.

For parents or coaches seeing trends can help in some areas so ranking data can be helpful. Improvement as the time go by can be a positive+

Perpetual top (10) billing seems to happen each year for a certain set of clubs teams so it's just a way to see that in some cases. Seeing a team in the top 5 for a long span can be a plus for recruiting but in youth sports it's about how you finish each tournament or season that's more valuable.
 
Youth soccer can be unpredictable at times, past doesn't predict the future and ratings don't play the games.

This is true to a point, but it understates the predictive value. It turns out the youth soccer *is* quite predictable based on past results. With multiple seasons to point to now while using these ratings, in just my kid's case - I can look back to 65 individual games with ratings. The team overperformed 7 times. The team underperformed 10 times. And performed as expected 48 times. They have lost exactly one game, that they were predicted to win. They have won a handful of games that they were predicted to lose. (for clarity, they have a few hundred games of experience - it's just the data only goes back 65 games)

Just look up a team that you were aware of, look down in their history, and you can see the overperforming (marked in green) or underperforming (marked in red).

For parents or coaches seeing trends can help in some areas so ranking data can be helpful. Improvement as the time go by can be a positive+

We went into a tournament a few weekends ago against some talented teams, with the prediction to lose 2 of 3, for varying amounts. Walking out of that tournament with 3 ties means the coach has objective data showing how well the kids performed, and whether they are continuing to improve.

Clearly anything can happen on any day, and sometimes there will certainly be surprises. And there are the larger arguments, that since winning isn't the primary goal of youth soccer - predicting winning is even less important in the grand scheme of things.

But fallible humans like knowing a little bit about what's going to happen tomorrow, from the weather to the markets to sports to reality TV results. This app does a damn good job of feeding that itch.
 
OK, I have clarification on how the Club ratings are calculated. It's the average of the ratings of the top teams, as if two clubs playing each other all brought only their single best teams in each age group, then aggregated the scores to see who's on top. Any second or lower team in any age group should have no effect on a club's rating.

The FAQ has been updated to explain the club rankings.

Q: How are club rankings calculated?

A: We use the average of the ratings of the top teams. This is equivalent to two clubs playing their top teams against each other and then aggregating the scores to see who is best.

We include the core competitive age groups of U11 - U17. If a club doesn’t have a team in an age group, then it is given zero credit in the average.
 
The Club rankings algorithm has been tweaked a bit; I think it's been a good improvement. It takes the top teams from U11 - U17 (1 top team from each age group), and calculates the average rating. Clubs need at least 5 teams to be ranked. It no longer averages zeroes in if there is no team in a specific age group. It updates every day. Here's what it's showing today for Girls, Boys, and Combined (in California).

Girls clubs.jpg Boys clubs.jpg Combined.jpg
 
The Club rankings algorithm has been tweaked a bit; I think it's been a good improvement. It takes the top teams from U11 - U17 (1 top team from each age group), and calculates the average rating. Clubs need at least 5 teams to be ranked. It no longer averages zeroes in if there is no team in a specific age group. It updates every day. Here's what it's showing today for Girls, Boys, and Combined (in California).

View attachment 14946 View attachment 14947 View attachment 14948
Interesting, theres clubs from ECNL, GA, Next, etc + Norcal and Socal. Also several clubs that that consistantly deliver quality but arent always recognized for it.

It wonder if this will drive clubs into their closed leagues or less.

It will definately make tournaments like Surf Cup where clubs play each that normally dont more interesting
 
Where YSR's algorithm failed was in over rewarding blowouts......meaning teams in Socal league who were winning 6-0 every weekend were ranked ahead of ECNL teams who were winning 2-1 or tying the majority of their games......I am assuming that is still the case.....YSR was still the best but this was a definite flaw at the older ages U-13+++
 
I think any significant inaccuracies there may be more of a symptom of lack of inter-play, then a decision to overweight (or underweight) blowouts. If in a hypothetical higher league, games are often 1 point affairs, while in a lower league, there are often blowouts - within each of the leagues themselves, relative ranking should remain accurate. If a high scoring team in the lower league is 6 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 6 goals better. And if a high scoring team in the higher league is only 3 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 3 goals better.

Now if none of the higher league ever play any of the lower league in any recorded games or tournaments, it becomes a definition problem. Do you set the top league starting point 3 points higher to start? 6 points higher? 20 points higher? To establish the first reference point, it's probably a bit of finger held up in the wind. After only 5 or 6 games within that league, there is plenty of info to rate the individual teams against each other, even if there is zero history prior of any of them. But if there is no relative history of those teams playing with any of the teams in the other league, it can be stuck at whatever initial rating was assumed. And in this hypothetical construct - a very high scoring team in the lower league might be expected to show a rating higher than an average team in the higher league.

So it becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, where leagues that are completely separated from play from other leagues, can't objectively and mathematically be ranked against each other - simply because there aren't enough events to point to where teams from the leagues are compared (via actual games) with each other. However - every time that even a single team within a closed league does go outside to play a tournament or similar against outside teams, that result is then applicable back to the source league, to help balance and normalize the rankings of even teams that never go outside for opponents. It appeared that one good example of this were the teams in Alaska earlier this year. The ratings of some of them were uncomfortably high. They tend to only play each other (it's Alaska!) so there is very little inter-play outside. But looking through them all recently, it seems there were enough tournaments that pulled just enough of them out to play outside, that the ratings of the entire state appear much more normalized with what one might expect.

With all of this, it becomes a bit intuitive that national ratings numbers between a team in Dubuque, a team in Boston, and a team in Seattle, may be a bit off - if none of them every play each other, and they don't play anyone else who plays them, and they don't play anyone else who plays them who plays them, etc. It's like trying to compare AAA baseball here in the US to the 2nd level baseball league in Japan. You can try - but without direct play, it's going to be mostly conjecture no matter how you try to do it. But - the relative rankings in the case of this app are necessarily much more relevant when you're using them to compare against teams in your area or conference who you actually do play, or will play, or have played.
 
I think any significant inaccuracies there may be more of a symptom of lack of inter-play, then a decision to overweight (or underweight) blowouts. If in a hypothetical higher league, games are often 1 point affairs, while in a lower league, there are often blowouts - within each of the leagues themselves, relative ranking should remain accurate. If a high scoring team in the lower league is 6 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 6 goals better. And if a high scoring team in the higher league is only 3 goals better than the lower scoring teams in that same league, they should have a ranking that is 3 goals better.

Now if none of the higher league ever play any of the lower league in any recorded games or tournaments, it becomes a definition problem. Do you set the top league starting point 3 points higher to start? 6 points higher? 20 points higher? To establish the first reference point, it's probably a bit of finger held up in the wind. After only 5 or 6 games within that league, there is plenty of info to rate the individual teams against each other, even if there is zero history prior of any of them. But if there is no relative history of those teams playing with any of the teams in the other league, it can be stuck at whatever initial rating was assumed. And in this hypothetical construct - a very high scoring team in the lower league might be expected to show a rating higher than an average team in the higher league.

So it becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, where leagues that are completely separated from play from other leagues, can't objectively and mathematically be ranked against each other - simply because there aren't enough events to point to where teams from the leagues are compared (via actual games) with each other. However - every time that even a single team within a closed league does go outside to play a tournament or similar against outside teams, that result is then applicable back to the source league, to help balance and normalize the rankings of even teams that never go outside for opponents. It appeared that one good example of this were the teams in Alaska earlier this year. The ratings of some of them were uncomfortably high. They tend to only play each other (it's Alaska!) so there is very little inter-play outside. But looking through them all recently, it seems there were enough tournaments that pulled just enough of them out to play outside, that the ratings of the entire state appear much more normalized with what one might expect.

With all of this, it becomes a bit intuitive that national ratings numbers between a team in Dubuque, a team in Boston, and a team in Seattle, may be a bit off - if none of them every play each other, and they don't play anyone else who plays them, and they don't play anyone else who plays them who plays them, etc. It's like trying to compare AAA baseball here in the US to the 2nd level baseball league in Japan. You can try - but without direct play, it's going to be mostly conjecture no matter how you try to do it. But - the relative rankings in the case of this app are necessarily much more relevant when you're using them to compare against teams in your area or conference who you actually do play, or will play, or have played.
Just to throw more gas on the fire often teams play up a year in tournaments. How does this track back to rankings?

If teams are able to compete a year or two up from their natural age how does this translate to age appropriate ranking?
 
Back
Top