Hello Tottenham fans! We are now (over) halfway through the 2024-25 Premier League season, and it’s time to crunch some numbers. Last season at the end of the year I posted a look at the masthead and community player ratings for fun, to see an overview of our ratings for individual players over the course of the season, and also compare where the masthead and the commentariat had similar or different opinions
Turns out that was a pretty good and fun activity. A heck of a lot of data entry since I hadn’t started doing it until April, but hey. Blog managers gotta work sometimes.
So let’s do that again, this time at the halfway point of 19 matches. This data includes all the matches from the first half of the season, from the draw with Leicester in week 1 to the draw with Wolves in week 19
The full spreadsheet is too long and cumbersome to embed in an article, so I’ll just post the summary columns here. But if you’re interested in looking at the full data, you can view it here.
Analysis
As before, there’s a decent amount of “squish” when you compare masthead numbers and community numbers. The nature of polling means that you will see significantly fewer 5.0s, even rounded, given out by the community, because the rest of the bulk results will naturally drag them down. The masthead is therefore freer to give higher ratings than the commentariat. That’s just the nature of public polling. I get to give my unvarnished opinion, and the rest of you get aggregated into a populist mush. C’est la vie.
Also, there are a bunch of players who played games who didn’t receive ratings because they weren’t in the game long enough, and those are obviously not represented on the chart. So this should be viewed as tracking performance of players who played enough minutes to receive a rating (again, a rather squishy metric but this is hardly a scientific poll).
It’s been a weird year, y’all. The aggregated Community ratings didn’t rate anyone at or above 4.0, which is kind of wild, but also... well, that sort of makes sense the way the season has gone, doesn’t it? Interestingly, the highest rated player by both the masthead and the commentariat? Ben Davies, with an aggregated rating of 3.9 in both cases.
Honestly, the masthead and the community ratings tracked pretty closely, which to me is both unsurprising, and considering how much stick I get in comments for rating players a half-star too high or low, also makes me laugh.
If you look at the standard deviation column (ST/DEV), it suggests the community thought Archie Gray was the most consistent performer, though the sample size is rather small with only seven games. If we use an arbitrary number of 12 games as the minimum benchmark, then — surprise! — Timo Werner has put in the most consistent performances, according to the site readers. The masthead had Lucas Bergvall as the most consistent (six game sample), along with, again, Timo (12 game sample). Note that consistent ≠ good, just consistent... looking at you, Timo Werner.
Interestingly, there was a handful of players that didn’t earn a rating below 3.0 from the masthead — Lucas Bergvall, Ben Davies, Alfie Dorrington, and Sergio Reguilon. But both Dorrington and Reggie only played one match in the first half of the season, so it’s not a very meaningful statistic. As for the commentariat, Bergvall, Dorrington, Davies, and Archie Gray all received minimum 3.0 ratings. Only Micky van de Ven and Guglielmo Vicario earned 5.0 ratings from the commentariat, and that should be taken as VERY high praise.
In general, there wasn’t too much deviation between the masthead and the community thus far. Weirdly, the masthead seemed to rate players (and Ange Postecoglou) slightly higher than the commentariat generally, though you can find specific instances that are the opposite, e.g. Mikey Moore. There’s probably a reason for that — the Ange Out discourse might have dragged some players down a touch, and there’s a bunch of error bars on this data because so many players have missed time due to injury. But I find it kind of fascinating.
Hope you enjoyed this, because it was a hell of a lot of work! We’ll do this again at the end of the season.