Recommended Reading: What the Hell Do These Player Ratings Mean, Anyway?

John Godfrey of the New York Times's soccer blog Goal has a good post on his philosophy regarding the ubiquitous 1-10 player ratings writers and viewers like to assign players after a game, as well as real-life examples of the ten possible results:

The Goal Blog publishes player ratings for most United States national team matches. Like most who do ratings, we use a 1-10 scale, and the volume of responses they produce shows these posts are both popular and a great tool for sparking conversation. But a Twitter conversation with the former U.S. national team defender Alexi Lalas, now an ESPN analyst, produced a bigger question: what do the numbers really mean? What’s the difference between, say, a rating of "5" and a rating of "7"? And is there any way to quantify or qualify the distinction?

- John C.L. Morgan