"Player value" is an ineffable, impossible and absolutely vital concept across every sport. Whether they know it or not, everyone is trying to figure it out -- even the coaches and decision-makers who trust their gut over a spreadsheet. When a manager chooses a certain lineup of players, they're making a judgment about the value of his players. These guys do the things that lead to winning more than the other guys. And same goes for player acquisition. Teams sign, loan, and trade for new personnel because they think they'll increase their chances of winning matches.
Of course, the spreadsheet non-skeptics have tried and typically failed to put a finer point on it. Thanks to being a game composed of a succession of discrete events and almost no teammate-to-teammate interactions, baseball has come the closest with wins above replacement -- a calculation of how many wins a player's performance has created compared to an easy-to-acquire, baseline ballplayer. But there's no unified agreement over to how to calculate the number. Every team and every analytics website has its own justification for WAR. In the NFL, quarterbacks are more valuable than defensive backs, who are more valuable than running backs, who are more valuable than punters, and so on.
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But beyond some basic broad-strokes ideas, there are still way too many moving pieces on each play to accurately parcel out credit to individual players. And in basketball, quantifying defensive value has proven elusive. Half of the game remains a mix of mystery, assumptions and inadequate statistics.
On its own search for value, soccer is way behind all three of those sports for a combination of cultural, structural, and computational reasons, but some back-of-the-napkin math can at least provide a baseline for what kind of value the best players might provide. So let's apply this thinking to Jan Oblak, a player who's been one of the best in the world -- and ranked No.1 goalkeeper in our 2021 edition of the FC 100 -- and see how he looks.