Here's an analysis on players castro impact rating for this season vs their guaranteed compensation. I understand the season has been short so far but this gives a good idea of the best value players we have and ones soaking up money for no purpose. I did not include players that haven't played for the first team, hence have no rating (ie Rogers). The ratings have no impact from minutes someone has played, they are calculated per game avg. SORTED: $/rating point *You can see here that Zardes cost us the most per performance he gives. He is young so you can chalk this up to potential but at his salary he should be playing better.
SORTED: Castrol Rating *Husidic is our best player per dollar starting regularly. Clearly a shrewd buy from Bruce.
Thanks for this. Obviously, the sample size is still very small, but it seems that our lower-expectation off-season signings - Gargan and Husidic, have been giving us really good value so far….
Juninho and Zardes to me raise the biggest questions. Neither are THAT young and especially for Juninho his performances don't warrant that salary. Interesting stat: Juninho has never scored for the Galaxy since he signed for us in MLS play. Also, funny Samuel is not on there, surely he still hits our cap.
strange, ur right. his stats page on wikipedia shows 0 goals since he signed tho... should know better than to trust that page
Thanks for doing this. I would note though that the role of # of minutes played does matter for some players in ways that are unclear: Those who have not played a specified amount of minutes each month (equal to approx 60% of season game time) will have their Castrol Index score divided by that amount of minutes, therefore penalising players who are either injured, not selected or suspended for a considerable period of time. I've read this statement several times and I still don't understand exactly what it means. Players who haven't played 60% of available minutes have their raw score divided by "that amount of minutes"? LA so far has had 270 minutes available, 60% of that is 162 minutes, so players who haven't played 162 minutes will have their Castrol raw score divided by 162?! That doesn't make sense and I have no clue what it really means.
Maybe the numerator is a function of number of minutes played, so to put it on a per-minute basis they divide by the actual number of minutes played by that player. But if you don't hit the 60% threshold, they divide by 60% rather than the (smaller) actual number of minutes played by that player to act as a penalty.
Yeah, the Castrol index is a bit sketchy and subjective in my book. But this gives a general idea about our "bigger" players.
I don't think sorting this $/rating point makes sense. That assumes that the relationship between salary and performance is linear and that's almost certainly not true. In professional sports at a very high level a 10% performance increase over the average probably merits 10x the salary. Those are the players that win championships. By this measure Keane and Donovan are the second and third worst values on the team. A better comparison would be to group players with similar ratings and see who has the highest salary, or group players with similar salaries and see who has the worst rating.
Also, on-field performances only count for part of a player's salary; how they move the marketing needle is also a big factor in how much they can demand (particularly in MLS). Still, it's a good quick-and-dirty look at things.
never meant for it to be a perfect barometer but it does give you some insight about the team. I agree that the higher the salary does not mean a linear increase in performance and marketing also comes into context but I still think the chart proves some major points about outliers. Clearly Zardes is not good enough to warrant his salary but you can chalk that up to potential (altho he really is not THAT young). It also shows, as we all know by watching him, that Husidic is not only a terrific player but a terrific value.
That's probably the most succinct way to look at it. A player's worth is ultimately a function of how much revenue he generates for the club. That's mostly going to be how much he contributes to winning championships, but with players like Beckham there's a lot more value beyond what he does on the field.