Wonderstar Awards S112: League Of The Season (04/05/2014 09:08)

No man(ager) is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

- John Donne

 

Well, the end of Season 113 is upon us, and in Belizio's disorganised world that means it's time to catch up on some of the awards from Season 112 :-)

In a previous post I introduced an award recognising the top managers in the game - with the emphasis on overperforming their basic team strength. The aim of this award was to recognise some of the more skilful players at the game, and highlight some impressive achievements that might otherwise have flown beneath the radar - taking a low strength team to third in the league, that kind of thing.

 

For a rolling, weighted 5-season average of these scores check out the ManagerLeague League of Leagues!

 

But as the poem referenced above reminds us, no manager is an island. So who has the biggest and best continent? The leagues in ManagerLeague vary a lot in depth (number of active teams) and quality. You can measure the strength of a department in a few ways - the default way to do so is by averaging the team quality of the top 12 teams; by this measure the strongest leagues would be the likes of Norway, England and Romania. But of course we don't need to rate teams on paper - as we've seen, a good manager can get a team performing well above its quality level - so better to rate them on results! The leagues in ManagerLeague don't face off directly (there's no equivalent to the World Cup) but they do square off indirectly through their top clubs in the Champions League and the SuperCup. So I've put together a table based on each league's average performance in these competitions in Season 112, similar to the performance measure used to calculate the Manager Ratings. The more games won by teams from a particular league, and the further they go in the contest, the higher the league's rating's going to be.

And because the best leagues should be exciting and competitive, we can also throw in a rating to measure the strength and depth of a league - essentially, how strong are the other teams compared to the top few? If one side runs away with the title and has it sewn up by round 25, that's less exciting than one where the top five positions are still all up for grabs at the end of the season. 

So, I've programmed the numbers machine to give each league two ratings: One for performance and one for depth. Each ranges from 0 to 100, and a final league rating is made up of two parts performance, and one part depth. So which leagues were the most impressive in Season 112? The table gives each league in order, with columns showing the number of international places assigned to each league, their strength (based on both player Q and team stats, not used in the final rating), their international performance and their competitiveness. Ranks are in brackets:

 

 

Vietnam are our top league for Season 112. Well done guys, for competing strongly both at home and in the international contests! The top four leagues - Vietnam, Poland, Australia and Hungary - were very close, and despite all getting only 4 international places they were way out in front on that score. Akneo took the Champions League title for Poland, PoolEver and Lajhar Tevek reached the semi-finals of each contest, VNWinMySelf were runners up in the Super Cup, and Melbourne Bushrangers and Klaebs Kings both had strong runs for Australia. And plenty of other sides from those countries finished in the top three in their groups. All four leagues should be hassling Spinner to change the distribution of entries!

Norway were our fifth ranked side, not so much due to their performance - which were middling, and much lower than you'd expect from the strongest league on paper - but because of a phenomenally tight top division. Just eleven points separated 1st from 7th, and Goals Galore took the title with just 58 points - that's 6 fewer than the previous season, when they finished third... This season Toreknall have secured the title before the final round of matches, but the race for the international spots is still very exciting.

- Belizio

 

 

 

  

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