Ryan O'Hanlon, ESPN.com writerDec 13, 2024, 12:00 PM
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It's been a year. Yep, that's it. Just "a year." A good year or a bad year for the U.S. men's national team? Well ...
The USMNT's last competitive tournament before it co-hosts the 2026 World Cup was a complete disaster. The Americans were eliminated from the Copa América before the knockout rounds, and coach Gregg Berhalter was fired soon afterward.
But then they replaced Berhalter with arguably the best candidate available in former Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, and Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino. If it took a terrible tournament to get the U.S. Soccer Federation to hire one of the best coaches in the world, then maybe it was actually a good year? I don't know.
What I do know, though, is that this team is only going to go as far as the players take it -- no matter who is the coach. With the year wrapping up, we're breaking out the final edition of the USMNT Player Performance Index for 2024. We've ranked everyone in the player pool based on their performance at the club level, and then the PPI cuts it down to a top 50.
Who is missing? And how do we rank the USMNT player pool?
When we did this season's first edition of the rankings in October, there wasn't a ton of data to work with. First, there had been just over a month of matches. And second, the summer of international tournaments meant a bunch of Americans had arrived late to preseason with their clubs and only played sparingly over the first few weeks of the new season.
So, we anchored the rankings on each player's Transfermarkt value -- a crowd-sourced valuation that isn't a perfect representation of player quality but is close enough. That made up 60% of the rating. Then 30% went to the quality of the player's team (as determined by Opta's global power rankings, which rate every professional team in the world), and 10% went to the percentage of minutes he had played for said team in league play.
Well, now we're far enough into the season that we can flip things around. We're giving 75% of the rating to the quality of that player's team, 20% to the share of available minutes he has played and 5% to his Transfermarkt value. As the season goes on, we'll drop the transfer value input and increase the importance of minutes played.
In short, we're awarding players for playing well enough to get identified by better teams, and then we're adjusting that based on how much they're actually playing. You can't provide any value if you're not playing, but it's also harder to get playing time when you're on a better team. This formula takes it all into account.