Seattle Sounders' Forwards Reviewed Through Lens of Tools

Good work.

As I said when you first mentioned these, I don’t envy your task. Montero is a great example. Technical ability is an easy one. Tactical judgment is tough, because he shows glimpses of brilliant passing and vision, but not consistently and without some other aspects, like off-ball runs. It’s something that should improve in the future. Offensive and defensive skills seem pretty easy (did you use PP90 for this at all?). Physique is another tough one. He is small but strong, and uses his body well sometimes (like when he so easily turned the Houston CB). I feel he has a very quick first few steps, but will lose out in any sprint. Stamina could be in question, but he did play in many more games than anyone else on our team in 2010.

A big question is whether we want to see improvement in some areas at the expense of others. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, but it certainly could. If Fredy worked harder on the defensive end, on the press and the “stay with it,” would it affect his ridiculously strong offensive output? If so, is that worth it? Clearly, soccer is about scoring goals and preventing goals; what balance is best? Is it better to have well-rounded players, or players who pick up the slack in one area so that others may excel?

Looking forward to the next in the series.

I think you’ve over rated Facito’s physique, but other then that, I think it’s a good start.

Was there any thought to breaking down offensive skills into creating for others and finishing?

My glance at the chart made it look ridiculously inflated because I suppose I am used to associating the 9+ with the Gerrards, Messis, and Shweinsteigers of the game. I thought it was a 10 point scale ranking all soccer players and 6 was a point of reference for an average starting MLS player on a grander 10 point scale. I always thought an 8 on a 10 point scale would make a player one of the best in the league in an area.

I love any attempt to talk about soccer in a quantitative way. I think these ratings are interesting precisely because they provide a starting point for talking about what players are good at, or what they lack. The thread above about Montero’s tactical skills is a good example of that. I do however think that they break down in a couple respects.

First of all the amalgomation of physique into a single stat doesn’t work for me. When I think of footballers with superior physique I usualy break them down into seperate categories that aren’t correlated, eg quickness/speed and strength/size. For example you have Nkufo as having a higher physique rating than Montero or Fucito, but both of those players are quicker and faster thatn Nkufo. So saying that player A has a higher physique rating than player B doesn’t tell me anything about how a team would do if they substitutued A for B.

The second issue that comes to mind looking over these ratings is that ‘defense’ means a completely different thing for a winger than it does for a striker, and it means something else entirely for a centerback. You could put Hurtado up top and he probably wouldn’t be very good at doing the things that you’d normally ask a striker to do defensively. In the case of these players does the low ratings (3.3-5.4) indicate that as strikers go they don’t perform well at the tasks they’re asked to do, or does it mean that if they are asked to sit deeper and play more defensively they wouldn’t be very good at that?

Not wanting to have two numbers for physique to avoid over emphasising it makes a lot of sense. I’d argue that you’ve already stated that the numbers aren’t equally weighted and that the average doesn’t tell you how “good” a player is, so you could get away with it if you wanted to go that route.

On the issue of defense it sounds like you’re saying the rating is supposed to capture how well the player does what’s asked of him at that position. If that’s the case why not just set the scale so that an average defending MLS forward is a defensive 6? That way you wouldn’t end up with compressed numbers.

I guess what I’m strugling with is understanding how I should think about these numbers. Are players going to get rated on all five categories after each game? If so is part of the goal to try and talk about which players had the greatest impact in a particular game? Or is it supposed to be more of a subjective value over replacement player like rating, where I should think about it as “we have a left back that’s a X offensively we should be a more potent offensive team with a player that’s rated as X+N.”