Youth Soccer Rankings ?

[RandomSoccerFan]

Only playing highly ranked teams in league doesnt immediately inflate a teams ranking it takes time to occur. Also all teams in the league have to only be playing teams in that league. If one team goes off the reservation and losses it affects everyone else.

This is exactly what’s happening. Teams in these closed league play most of their games against themselves, even if they lose one game badly against an outsider team, their ranking aren’t affected because there are 9 other games that fits the soccer ranking prediction. It’s like you said a “self fulfilling” prophecy.

You both realize you're arguing contradictory points and think that you're agreeing, right? One of you is saying that once a team plays outside the league, the results can/will affect everyone else that is within the league. The other is saying that when a team plays outside the league, the results don't count for enough.

You both can't be correct. For what it's worth, Carlsbad7 is closer to the truth.

It might make sense to add additional weight to cross league games as long a both teams were equally ranked. This in theory would incentivize cross league play. This is assuming that US Soccer wants to encourage cross league play. Everyone seems pretty happy the way things are right now.

Additional weight should be placed on games that better predict actual performance. Less weight should be placed on games that aren't as good at predicting actual performance. To your point - the results of games between teams that are close in rating are already more heavily weighted, than games between teams that are further apart from each other. How much weight isn't based on feels - it's based on how much weight results in the highest actual predictivity that can be achieved.

I just doesn't seem the cross pollination between different groups is sufficient to get robust results. Case in point - our older teams (U16, U19) are consistently rated at 4-5 points higher than our U14 group. During intraclub weekly intraclub trainings and scrimmages, the U14 is obviously the stronger team - consistently going up by 1-2 goals over 15-20 minutes. Sure, they're not official matches, but we've seen this over the past 2 years week in week out. We find soccer rankings to be predictive within the group, but it hasn't done a great job predicting results between different groups of players.

This is interesting, and I wonder why you're seeing that. How are the individual teams compared to their peer teams in other clubs - are the U14's performing better comparatively than the olders? I wonder what's significantly different (if anything) from the trainings/scrimmages than the results of recorded games. For what it's worth, I haven't seen it with clubs we've been involved with. The stronger teams (by SR, by standings bracket, by everything) tend to perform well during any intraclub events as well, there aren't any real surprises where a team is unexpectedly strong (or weak).

Awhile back SR shared some of their predictivity stats, to gauge how well it was predicting results among games of various different groups:

Total cross-gender games with a win: 71.1% => Predictive power = 42.2%
Total cross-year games with a win: 84.0% => Predictive power = 68%

This was from a few seasons ago, so maybe things have shifted a bit. But for games between teams of different years, there was virtually no difference in predictivity compared to teams from the same year. It is still picking 5 of 6 games correctly.

 

[Scrub It Kook]

I can see why MLS next HD teams are afraid to play in Surf tournaments because they are half a year younger. But I don’t understand why there aren’t more ECNL teams in Albion tournaments. They will make a killing in there.

I see quite a few ECNL clubs at Albion tournaments for youngers, but not so much for olders. I wonder if it's because of the college coach exposure. Surf Cup showed over 150 confirmed attending coaches whereas the Albion Showcase listed 7 coaches confirmed. With the events happening just a couple of weeks apart, there's really no incentive.