U.S. Men’s National Team v. Belize, Portland, 7.9.13: The Folly and Irresistibility of Player Ratings

Whether or not U.S. critics and readers are more prone than their non-U.S. counterparts to assign, pore over, and otherwise value “ratings” of athletic performances, restaurants, rock albums, cars, hotels, books, and almost everything else that can be consumed in one way or another is debatable. I’ve certainly read that Americans are unusually obsessed with ratings, and there’s evidence for this on websites and magazine racks across the country. Then again, the archetype of ratings guides is not American, but French. The Michelin Guide began assigning stars to restaurants back in 1926 and is now so powerful that at least one French chef may have killed himself over the prospect of his restaurant losing its three-star status.

I trust that no American soccer player has ever grown despondent over a critic’s rating of his game performance. But God knows most players will have an opportunity to see their performances rated after a game is played. The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, Goal.com, Soccer America, and many other publications that report on soccer more or less regularly publish player ratings, typically based on a ten-point scale.

It must be said, or rather repeated, that there’s an element of ridiculousness to all ratings that aren’t strictly scientific, that aren’t essentially Geiger counters measuring radiation levels. Soccer ratings have long struck me as particularly ridiculous. How can a soccer writer pretend to judge all the players in a match, or even just players from one team, based on a single broadcast or on seeing the game in person? An individual player’s performance must be judged in large part by his movement off the ball—in some cases well away from the ball—and no single person can keep track of every player on the field at all times. Without actually painstakingly studying game film in the manner of professional coaches and scouts, I don’t see how a single person watching a game from start to finish once, especially on a TV (which captures only a fraction of the field), can seriously rate all the players’ performances.

Readers of player ratings should also remind themselves that critics have personal preferences like everybody else. I happen to love the way DaMarcus Beasley and Landon Donovan play soccer. If I were to rate those players’ performances using a numeric scale, I might unconsciously overrate them, or even try to compensate for my known preferences and adjust my ratings downward, potentially underrating them. In any case, I know it’s difficult for me to be objective about them. This is true when criticizing a player in prose, of course, but writing naturally involves opinion and argument, and numbers imply scientific objectivity.

I’ve often wondered when reading player ratings (and game commentary) if there are critics’ darlings in soccer, just as there are in other areas like music and drama. I think there must be. And while it’s practically impossible to support this with evidence, I’d say that Clint Dempsey is a U.S. soccer critics’ darling, that our soccer writers are less likely to negatively criticize him after a mediocre performance than they are most other players. Michael Bradley and Stuart Holden I also suspect are currently critics’ darlings, even more so than Dempsey at the moment.

Yes, by virtually any standard, Dempsey and Bradley are now the U.S.’s top outfield players. But the point here is that their reputations, however justified, almost certainly affect critics’ ratings of their individual performances. What professional critic wants to put his head on the block and claim that a great player had an off day, unless there’s zero ambiguity about it? Similarly, a guy like Jermaine Jones, who has an equally justified reputation for erratic, undisciplined play, may sometimes not receive the high ratings another player might get after a good performance. Jones also has to my mind—and I suspect to many others—an ugly game. And I suspect that that ugly game affects critics when they rate Jones’s performances. Should it? Chelsea’s victory over Barcelona in the 2012 Champion’s League final proved beyond a doubt that aesthetics have zero bearing on the outcome of a game. And you could make a strong argument that aesthetics shouldn’t factor into player ratings, but I believe they do.

Finally, I believe the final score of a game skews the average player rating. It’s a little like the old saying: a rising tide floats all boats. And a victory raises all ratings. Should it? If a team scores a fluke goal at the end of a game, should all of that team’s player ratings be affected as a result? Similarly, should the losing team’s players’ scores be adjusted downward after the fluke goal? In theory I think player ratings should remain unaffected in such a situation, but in practice I strongly suspect that they are affected.

For those reasons and others, I’ve never seriously been tempted to assign player ratings. But I admit that I’m drawn to reading player ratings, just as many other fans are, judging by the number of ratings published after U.S. men’s national team games. So as an exercise, after the U.S.’s snow game against Costa Rica in March, I decided to jot down my own player ratings. I then compared my scores to four published ratings. My ratings were more or less in line with all of them, but virtually identical to Avi Creditor's at Sports Illustrated. I suppose that’s evidence (however meager) that Creditor and I see the game in much the same way, or appreciate the same qualities in players.

Unfortunately (unless I missed something) Creditor did not publish player ratings of the U.S. men’s national team’s recent 6-1 victory over Belize in Portland. I decided to write and publish here my player ratings from that game. I wrote the ratings a day or two afterwards, basing them on my notes (and my memory, obviously). I apparently overrated Donovan, rating him slightly higher than Chris Wondolowski, who scored a hat trick and therefore realistically must have been man of the match. Still, I stand by the claim that Donovan had a fantastic game, and it’s a wonder given all the chances he created that he only had two assists. Oddly, I appear to have underrated my man Beasley. (I certainly didn’t do that after the Costa Rica game. Beasley was magnificent in that one.)

My player ratings for the Gold Cup match against Belize appear in the table below (MAS=Missed a Sitter), along with those published by Brian Sciaretta in The New York Times (NYT), Greg Seltzer in mlssoccer.com (MLS), and Steve Davis in ProSoccerTalk (PST). If a player played less than 90 minutes, then the number of minutes played appears in parentheses beside his name. Four players received individual ratings with variations of at least two points, and I’ve highlighted those ratings. One of the players was the goalkeeper, Nick Rimando, always a tough position to judge in a rout. The average player rating from each source appears in the last row, the average rating for each player in the last column.

U.S. Men’s National Team Player Ratings, v. Belize, July 9

U.S. Player	MAS	NYT	MLS	PST	Average
Clarence Goodson	5.5	5	6.5	7	6.0
Michael Orozco	6.5	5.5	7	7	6.5
Michael Parkhurst	4.5	5	6	5	5.1
DaMarcus Beasley	6	6	6.5	7	6.4
Mix Diskerud	5.5	6	7	5	5.9
Joe Corona (66)	6	5	5.5	6	5.6
José Francisco Torres (61)	5.5	6	6	5	5.6
Kyle Beckerman (45)	5.5	4.5	6.5	6	5.6
Chris Wondolowski	8	7.5	7.5	8	7.8
Landon Donovan	8.5	7	7	7	7.4
Nick Rimando	5	5	6.5	7	5.9
Alejandro Bedoya (24)	5.5	5.5	5.5	6	5.6
Stuart Holden (45)	6.5	7	7	7	6.9
Brek Shea (29)	5.5	5	5.5	6	5.5
Average Rating	6.0	5.7	6.4	6.4	6.1