Short Thread:
— How Scoring Impacts our Perception of Performance

Please RT this thread. I feel it is an important issue.

A player can lose possession a lot, not pick out passes to runners, drift to bad spaces impacting others’ spacing, make loose touches on easy passes and more but if he scores at the end he'll be rated high(er) despite being detrimental to his team for almost the entire game.

A CF can spend a whole game making great runs, being an outlet, pressing & occupying CBs, linking play and more — all positively impacting the game in huge ways — but if they don't score a good chance it'll be said that they had a bad game because “CFs are there to score”.

Though, and funnily enough, if a CF does score goals but barely does the other things they'll still be criticised for not doing the other things despite doing the thing CFs are “there to do”. Also, the player's role in the team might only be to score, too. This must be factored.

Football is a low-scoring sport so goals do matter. However, there are many games in which the goalscorers were harmful to their own teams up until they scored and had they not been so bad overall, perhaps the team would've scored much earlier but *they* were the problem.

Likewise many players positively impact the game and are key to an attack that, without them, would barely function in the same way. Yet, if others miss opportunities they create or they miss themselves then their whole performance will be looked down upon despite them being key.

So, the viewer needs to establish principles for what a performance is. If a player harms his team almost all game but scores did he have a good game? If another benefits his team all game but misses did he have a bad game?

These are important questions to consider.

Lastly, this is important for when we do our player ratings. A person should look at a whole performance and not just remember moments whilst generalising those moments (around 2-3% of the performance) to = 100% of the player's performance.

There are many other examples to bring but I intended for this thread to be quick and concise so I'll leave it here.

End of Thread