Got Soccer vs Youth Soccer Rankings

[Anonymous]

When researching soccer rankings and teams, which is the preferred site and why?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:When researching soccer rankings and teams, which is the preferred site and why?

Youth soccer rankings because it pulls from a broad array of data sources. GotSoccer relies almost exclusively on tournament wins and doesn’t pull in data for league play from some leagues.

[Anonymous]

It's not even worth more than 5 second debate:

gotsoccer only does gotsoccer events.

YSR combines gotsoccer and total global sports (TGS). As an example, ECNL clubs only use TGS, so gotsoccer will show only ECNL clubs with gotsoccer tournaments.

YSR is as close as we'll get to a ranking system worth your time, if at all. TopDrawerSoccer has rankings based on human eye-test and they likely look at GS or YSR, but it's not fully known.

[Anonymous]

YSR also figures an aggregate P.I. index which gives you a fair idea of what can be expected. It's not perfect but I would say it predicts game outcomes better than 50%.

GotSoccer on the other hand predicts nothing and uses points for tournament wins while also allowing different point totals for each tournament. IMO, it's a horrible system.

[Anonymous]

It’s interesting that tournament organizers use GotSoccer to determine divisions though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s interesting that tournament organizers use GotSoccer to determine divisions though.

This is not true at all. As a team manager, I have to submit a sheet on our "best wins", tournament placements, etc. The organizers of major tournaments do not solely use GotSoccer or any one site. As a recent example, we were in top Jeff Cup bracket, and should've been, but GotSoccer had us as over 100 in Virginia alone and hundreds in Region 1. If Jeff Cup organizers used just GotSoccer as you claimed, we'd be in the bottom bracket instead.

Gotsoccer allows for tournaments to enter scores and get the info updated very fast to the teams/parents/players. That is the #1 benefit of GotSoccer. The rankings are a side note now that TDS has their own system, which isn't exhaustive either. YSR is as close as we will get to anything worth a view.

[Anonymous]

All youth rankings suck.

And

The only ones who haven’t figured it out yet are U9-U14 parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All youth rankings suck.

And

The only ones who haven’t figured it out yet are U9-U14 parents.

True thats because after U14 the people obsessed with rankings turn too where is my DC ranked as a player who cares about the team. Unless you have a mediocre player in ECNL. In that case you are banking on your teams success because there's nothing special about your DC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's not even worth more than 5 second debate:

gotsoccer only does gotsoccer events.

YSR combines gotsoccer and total global sports (TGS). As an example, ECNL clubs only use TGS, so gotsoccer will show only ECNL clubs with gotsoccer tournaments.

YSR is as close as we'll get to a ranking system worth your time, if at all. TopDrawerSoccer has rankings based on human eye-test and they likely look at GS or YSR, but it's not fully known.

The difference in favor of youth soccer is actually greater than this.

1. Even worse than the missing games is gotsoccer's ranking algorithm. It awards points for winning or placing in tournaments and leagues, arbitrarily assigning different point values to different tournaments. It does not take account of the opponents, nor the scores. So gotsoccer awards the same number of points to a team which enters twenty tournaments and wins two of them, compiling a record of 16-44-30 along the way, and a team which enters two tournments and wins them both with a record of 10-0-0.

Youth soccer is a handicap system where each match played can move your ranking up or down based on the strength of the team you face and the margin of victory. For example if a team with a ranking of 40 plays a team with a ranking of 34, the expected margin of victory would be 6 goals. If the higher ranked team won by only 2-0, its ranking would be reduced. This ensures that a team cannot simply raise its ranking by playing more ranked games (or even just by focusing on weaker opposition) and counting points for the wins and ignoring the losses.

In other words got soccer approximates (this is not strictly true - but it's close enough to give you a sense of the fatal flaw) a team with a record of 20-0-0 the same as one with a record of 20-40-0, while YSR sees 20-0-0 the same as 10-0-0 and 20-40-0 the same as 2-4-0.

2. Youth soccer not only captues more results automatically than gotsoccer (GS and TGS) but also has a mechanism for anyone to notify the web-site of missing results from any competition which has results posted on the web, and to fix common errors such as multiple names for the same team. So YSR captures far more results than GS.

Even YSR is not perfect as it is difficult for any ranking system to correctly rank different pools of teams which rarely play matches between the pools - for example it used to struggle with ranking DA teams vs non-DA teams because there were so few matches between the two different groups. It is also not clear to me that their ranking algorithm reflects reality - is goal difference really an additive function? In other words if team A is 3 goals better than team B, and team B is 3 goals better than team C, does that really imply that A is 6 goals better than C? But it's surely closer to reality than gotsoccer's nonsense.

TopDrawerSoccer appears to pull names out of a hat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All youth rankings suck.

And

The only ones who haven’t figured it out yet are U9-U14 parents.

True thats because after U14 the people obsessed with rankings turn too where is my DC ranked as a player who cares about the team. Unless you have a mediocre player in ECNL. In that case you are banking on your teams success because there's nothing special about your DC.

Agree somewhat. For girls at least, after U15 it’s all about college looks *at the player* but those are easier to come by if the player is on a competitive team.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s interesting that tournament organizers use GotSoccer to determine divisions though.

This is not true at all. As a team manager, I have to submit a sheet on our "best wins", tournament placements, etc. The organizers of major tournaments do not solely use GotSoccer or any one site. As a recent example, we were in top Jeff Cup bracket, and should've been, but GotSoccer had us as over 100 in Virginia alone and hundreds in Region 1. If Jeff Cup organizers used just GotSoccer as you claimed, we'd be in the bottom bracket instead.

Gotsoccer allows for tournaments to enter scores and get the info updated very fast to the teams/parents/players. That is the #1 benefit of GotSoccer. The rankings are a side note now that TDS has their own system, which isn't exhaustive either. YSR is as close as we will get to anything worth a view.

Thanks. This is good to know.

[Anonymous]

I don't think any ranking system is perfect, especially in youth soccer, but I think youth soccer rankings are about a good as you can get. It has it flaws, but got soccer is a joke and can easily be manipulated by a coach trying to get points. I really like how youth soccer rankings has a team ranking index that ranks a team and then the teams they play.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't think any ranking system is perfect, especially in youth soccer, but I think youth soccer rankings are about a good as you can get. It has it flaws, but got soccer is a joke and can easily be manipulated by a coach trying to get points. I really like how youth soccer rankings has a team ranking index that ranks a team and then the teams they play.

No they aren't. Case in point, there is an 11 seed in the final four. So whatever they use to rank the teams only had UCLA as the 41st team at best. That is out of only 64 teams also. How many U14 soccer teams are there in the country? Thousands? I'm sure they have better analytics to rank college basketball teams than youth soccer teams as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All youth rankings suck.

And

The only ones who haven’t figured it out yet are U9-U14 parents.

True thats because after U14 the people obsessed with rankings turn too where is my DC ranked as a player who cares about the team. Unless you have a mediocre player in ECNL. In that case you are banking on your teams success because there's nothing special about your DC.

Agree somewhat. For girls at least, after U15 it’s all about college looks *at the player* but those are easier to come by if the player is on a competitive team.

Rankings doesn’t make your team competitive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All youth rankings suck.

And

The only ones who haven’t figured it out yet are U9-U14 parents.

True thats because after U14 the people obsessed with rankings turn too where is my DC ranked as a player who cares about the team. Unless you have a mediocre player in ECNL. In that case you are banking on your teams success because there's nothing special about your DC.

Agree somewhat. For girls at least, after U15 it’s all about college looks *at the player* but those are easier to come by if the player is on a competitive team.

Rankings doesn’t make your team competitive.

No, but the team being competitive will make the ranking.