Using Power Ranking to determine a team’s quality in WSL | OneFootball

Using data in analysis and recruitment is something people in football often do. But most of the time, the information available to us looks at performance data stylistically. It looks at attempts and playing style rather than performance in quality.

In this article, we will introduce data from Opta’s Power Ranking and how we can use it to look at the quality of teams.

Power Rankings Explained

What are power rankings? Opta explains it as follows:

The Opta Power Rankings are a global team ranking system that assigns an ability score to over 13,000 men’s domestic football teams and over 2,000 women’s domestic football teams on a scale between zero and 100, where zero is the worst-ranked team in the world and 100 is the best team in the world.

In the ranking above, you can see the top 20 teams globally in women’s football, according to Opta. It features each club’s ranking, score and positional change compared to seven days earlier. The club’s latest results or performances of other teams may impact a club’s ranking. This also gives us an idea of how their form is and whether we can expect a certain result.

Power Rankings: WSL and Championship

With these power rankings, we can do a variety of things, but we can also see what the best teams are for example in the first two tiers of English football.

In the image above, you can see how the top 23 teams in England are ranked. The teams feature in the WSL, but also in the Women’s Championship. This allows us to see how well a team is doing currently, how they have changed in the last 7 days and whether rivals are doing the same.

Data without context is obviously meaningless, but with the right context of journalism and results on the pitch, this can be useful for analysis. This tool can help us judge quality and expectation while still remaining objective in our writing.

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