World cup analysis - Qatar 2022
How the top teams at FIFA World Cup would compare according to the Ranko score
Some days ago I was asked how the Ranko score for European football teams could be used as a score for individual football players. Thinking about it, I reasoned that it perhaps suffices to combine the Ranko team score with a performance metrics for the individual players. As an avid user of the whoscored page I am familiar with the ranks of players within the teams. I was never convinced, though, that the whoscored comparison between teams of different European competitions makes much sense, since a team playing in a weaker league can more easily obtain higher scores than one playing in a strong league. But I figured, if one relates each player to his team’s average and then to the respective Ranko team score, one can compute a Ranko value for each player. Let’s test it:
Mbappe, player of France and PSG, has an individual “who-score” of 7.87 for the current season. The team, PSG, has a score of 7.02. The difference of 0.85 should then be converted to a Ranko value. This can be done approximately by taking the range of values for all teams of a league, say Premier League, and relate that to the range of Ranko values of said league. This gives a conversion rate of 4.3, i.e. the 0.85 premium of Mbappe converts into 3.66 Ranko extra points. Adding this to the PSG-Ranko score of 1.48 we get 5.13. Same thing for all France players (selection according to the Guardian’s prognosis of the first 11):
Lloris 1.01
Pavard 2.80
Varane 1.46
Konate 1.73
Hernandez 0.31
Tchouameni 2.45
Fofana 1.67
Rabiot 2.23
Griezmann 1.03
Benzema 4.42
Mbappe 5.13
As team average this gives an impressive 2.21 for France, which is in fact higher than the Ranko score of the best club, Bayern München, of 2.03.
The same can be done for other teams as well. For Germany a mean of 1.61 results which would still place them within the top 3 club teams. The first ten teams are then:
France 2.21
Brazil 2.05
England 1.93
Germany 1.61
Portugal 1.44
Netherlands 1.43
Argentina 1.29
Belgium 0.86
Spain 0.65
Denmark 0.44
(Some players are not playing in the top 5 European leagues and are omitted form the average, which would probably leave the score of Netherlands somewhat overestimated.)
Spain’s low ranking is mainly because of the lackluster performance of their key Barca players this season, while Argentina ranks low because all players except for Messi score below 2. Speaking of Messi: In the individual ranking he clears the top spot with a wide margin, being the best player (top who-score) in a top-5 team (PSG).
The complete ranking:
Messi 8.48
Haaland 5.51
Neymar 5.43
Mbappe 5.13
De Bruyne 4.91
Cabella 4.89
Terrier 4.83
Kimmich 4.78
Trippier 4.66
Nkunku 4.40
Of course, Haaland is the best player who is not participating in Qatar. The other notable home-officers during the world cup are French, showing the continued strength of their current generation: Terrier (Rennes), Cabella (Lille) and Nkunku (RB Leipzig) who would in fact all take top spots in the French team.