Another Dying Meme - Soccer will never work in America

However, the issue should be obvious: national teams are in no way representative of club football. That site you keep linking to with its predictive numbers made the same mistake: tally individual player quality, add and hey presto. But by those calculations, England is better than Germany. Wrong. England held up fairly well, but regardless it never fully had the quality on the field that Germany had, despite having more net capital. That’s because net capital doesn’t tell you that much about how well a national team plays. That’s because Germany always plays better than its players individually would make you figure. It’ll hurt the eyes of any statistician, but you simply can not measure that based on league considerations, yet it has always been true.

Even if national team play had a direct correlation to the quality of the players at their clubs, that doesn’t tell you much about individual players, and thus nothing about the sum of players in the league. The value of the Dutch offense is much, much higher than the defense, yet numerically both are performing well. Messi has never been as good when playing for Argentina as he was for Barca, but even if he was, how would you distill his value as one player for the Primera from his value as one player for Argentina. It’s impossible, which throws another wrench into the cogs of the calculation. There are players who have no value in their league but plenty nationally (Kingson, Klose) and players who have much less value nationally than in the league (Muntari, Christiano Ronaldo). There’s just no way to track that.

Then there’s leagues that are driven mostly by national and/or young talent, who are below the excellent players of the national side but that’s hardly a mark against them, they could play for most other national sides. And if they did they’d score points in your system. But they don’t, so no points. Netherlands, Argentina, name ’em.

Objectively, there should be little argument that the world top is England-Spain-Germany-Italy-France, in that order, shuffle as you wish. Followed by or intermixed by Russia, Brazil and Argentina. Followed by a giant clusterfuck including the Dutch Eredivisie and somewhat lower the MLS. I’ll trust my eyes, and my eyes tell me your tier 1/2 teams are equivalent to our middle-of-the-pack teams.

Thing is, the only reliable measure is the UEFA coefficient. Any other calculation is flawed, whether it be IFFHS secretive and dubious calculations or your imperfect method. UEFA only works in UEFA, yes, never said otherwise, I just said it’s the only one that really works. There is no statistical method, no matter how perfect, that can compare athetic teams that never compete directly (in a meaningful way). It’s an exercise in folly.

Your stat-tracking would probably improve if you encapsulate inter-league competitions, whether it be the UEFA or CONCACAF champions league, or UEFA coefficient.