SSL Club Rating History - Glicko-2

[lemonoppy]

There are a lot of elo comparisons online between things, and it makes sense, it’s an easy, well defined metric that you can bang out in a spreadsheet, however, we’ve also got improvements on elo that are a bit more difficult to implement, and so, SSL Glicko-2 time!

Glicko is a similar thing to Elo, you compare the results and if you win, your rating goes up, and if you lose, rating go down. The math bit kinda complicated, but the gist of it is that Glicko improves on rating by adding some factors such as rating confidence, over more games recorded, the confidence interval on your rating gets more and more baked in, but if you play against someone who’s rating is unsure because they’re a new team to the league, for example, your rating change will be smaller, since there’s less confidence in how good that team actually is, you might be smurfing on an expansion team, so while their rating might start at 1500 like everyone else, they are truly a 1300 rated team.

A second improvement for Glicko is that we measure based off of sets of games, instead of sequentially going through games like with Elo, with Glicko, sets of games are calculated in a batch, for example a full season of games. This really improves on use for something like sim leagues where the team quality does not drastically change within a season, but between seasons with regressions, signings, and call-ups, the quality of teams can change a lot.

So, with all that pre-amble, here’s a cooler look at SSL club history and rankings within the league!

Over the history of the SSL, I’ve grabbed the non-friendly games that all the clubs have played, from Season 1 to Season 22, and ran it through the Glicko-2 script I’ve got! Teams will pop-in as they join the league.

Working backwards, we’ve got a truly dominant stretch from Reykjavik United, since Season 111, they’ve been seen as the dominant, top team in the league. Being on top for 12 seasons in a row leads to a question of league balance. Maybe, it’s too long to be the top team in the league but very impressive nonetheless. Schwarzwälder FV has given them a run for their money, flirting with 1700 for the last bit, but looks like they’re coming back down to median, but the rising stars in Hollywood FC and União São Paulo are ones to watch. União São Paulo in particular has had a meteoric rise since being the bottom team in the league in S17, and at their rate of improvement, I’m sure they’ll be challenging for the top soon.

The title for the worst rated team in the league is the new expansion team, Liffeyside Celtic FC, at 1292, they have the worst recorded rating in the league and I assume they’ll be looking at 1OA again this season. A.C. Romana seems like they’re on a downward slope with Tokyo S.C., and it’ll be interesting to see how they end up this coming season.

If we do an absolute rating chart, we can see the rises and falls more clearly, and I think this chart ends up being an overall better way to view the way the league has gone. It’s a bit tricky since I’ve got the numbers to be anchored to the top, so Hollywood is the best team in the league but their number of competitors were quite low, and they slipped into being mid for a while as more teams joined.

All the Elo gamers are cool but I thought taking a look with another type of rating system would be an interesting look at the history of the team performances in the league.

[donut]

USP not being first clearly shows how broken this system is, 5/5