It’s that time again! We take a look at how the NASL and USL rankings have shaken up following the wild month of June.
Just like that, June has come and passed us all by. As the Round of 16 in the US Open Cup gets underway this week, we take a look at how our power rankings have changed, as Miami FC of the NASL along with Sacramento Republic FC and FC Cincinnati of USL get ready to take on MLS foes once again. This time around, we’ve simply added a figure that shows how far the team has moved in the ranks but does not have any impact on rankings themselves.
Check out the first edition here if you need a refresher.
All matches are accounted for up to June 25, 2017.
Rating Method
Feel free to skip this if you don’t care. Also, feel free to double-check our work.
First, we asked ourselves the question; how could we quantify what makes a soccer team better than another? What stats or figures would you include? We considered all meaningful competitions Division 2 clubs participate in (i.e. the US Open Cup, Canadian Championship, and Caribbean Cup), and came up with the following formula,
(Total Goals Scored)-(Total Goals Conceded)+(Shutouts)+(Comeback Wins)+(Adjusted Road Points)-(Adjusted Dropped Home Points)= Index total.
Then, we took the index total and dived it by an adjusted match rate, to level a number of matches played by each team, for a final adjusted index total.
We used the 589 regular season matches from USL and both the Spring and Fall NASL seasons last year to adjust our point totals. Those matches saw 264 home wins, 157 draws, and 168 away wins. Considering each team’s total games across all competitions brought the average match count for each team to be just under 16 matches, which was used to find the adjusted match rate.