The 50 Best American Soccer Players Right Now, Ranked
I was tasked with coming up with a way to rank the club performance of every male American soccer player. To do so, I relied on my two favorite metrics for player performance: 1) Are you playing? And 2) is your team any good?
Christian Pulisic is no. 1. Read the rest to get numbers 2 through 50:
In the past, there was this idea in data analysis that if you're creating a kind of player rating for soccer and Lionel Messi isn't No. 1, then it means you need to start from scratch. We could probably apply a similar kind of thinking to the best American soccer player to ever live, too. If he's not at or near the top, then we're doing something wrong.
Although Pulisic's goals and assists this season still trail below his underlying metrics, the core truth here is that he has played a ton of minutes for the 16th-best team in the world, per Opta, and the third-best team in Italy, per the Serie A table. After playing 2,011 combined domestic minutes across his final two seasons at Chelsea, he has nearly reached that mark in his first season at AC Milan: 1,838 minutes across 23 starts.
Goodbye!
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