On the Development of a Soccer Player Performance Rating System for the English Premier League

Abstract

The EA Sports Player Performance Index is a rating system for soccer players used in the top two tiers of soccer in England—the Premier League and the Championship. Its development was a collaboration among professional soccer leagues, a news media association, and academia. In this paper, we describe the index and its construction. The novelty of the index lies in its attempts to rate all players using a single score, regardless of their playing specialty, based on player contributions to winning performances. As one might expect, players from leading teams lead the index, although surprises happen.

Rating players in test match cricket

“…Best batting and best bowling performances over a period can also be determined. The system we propose has certain similarities to that developed by Scarf and McHale (2005) and McHale et al (2012) for rating soccer players.…”

“…Many proprietary systems use a combination of the objective and subjective, with results forming the objective component, and the scaling of results according to other factors, such as the importance of a match or tournament, the subjective component (eg, ATP, 2012;FIFA, 2012). The rating of individual players in team sports is more challenging since individual contributions have to be determined in the presence of a team effect and due to the fact that individuals may make different types of contributions according to their specialisms (McHale et al, 2012). The rating of individual players in test cricket is the focus of this paper.…”

“…Using the session-by-session match outcome probabilities, we measure the effect of a contribution (runs scored or wickets taken during a session) on the match outcome probabilities; the greater the effect, the greater the value of the contribution and the more highly the contribution should be rated in the rating system. This principle of rewarding contributions by players in a team according to the effect of the contribution on the match outcome was essentially put forward in the development of the EA Sports Player Performance Index for soccer (McHale et al, 2012). The novelty of our paper lies in implementing this principle in the context of a sport in which players make fundamentally different kinds of contributions.…”

A weighted plus/minus metric for individual soccer player performance

“…It also summarized several other papers from previous decades starting with Britain's Charles Reep in the middle of the 20th Century (Reep & Benjamin, 1968). In terms of more recent research, there have been advances from Ian McHale, where in 2007, McHale and Scarf developed a match prediction model, and in McHale et al (2012), a player evaluation system was developed for the Barclay's Premier League using several sub-indices. While that approach uses a variety of individual player performance data (such as goals scored, shots, assists, clean sheets), the +/-metric we introduce focuses on the one most crucial team performance measure -goals -and uses it to determine individual contribution to team success.…”

Player evaluation in Twenty20 cricket

“…For example, points scored, rebounds, assists and steals are common statistics that provide insight on aspects of player performance in basketball. More complex statistics are also available, and we refer the reader to Oliver (2004) for basketball, Gramacy, Taddy and Jensen (2013) for hockey and McHale, Scarf and Folker (2012) for soccer.…”