You know what's quite hard? Ranking soccer players. How do I know that? Well, I've just done it.
Unlike in baseball, we don't have a Wins Above Replacement (WAR) number that represents everything a player does on a baseball field and then translates it into the actual value provided to his team. Unlike in American football, we don't have a clear positional spectrum where quarterbacks are by far the most important players, followed by the players who try to either tackle or protect the quarterback. And unlike in basketball, we don't have the constant substitutions and scoring that make it relatively easy to see how a team performs when a player is on and off the court.
Instead, it's just 90 minutes with mostly the same players on the field and barely anything that leads to a point being scored. Good luck deriving any kind of single-number value from that!
Of course, it doesn't mean we can't try. There are some substitutions in soccer, and we can look at all shots, not just the ones that go in, to get a bigger sample of events to tie both individual and team performance onto. Plus we know that most of the best players in the Premier League play for Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool -- both because they're among the richest teams in the world and because they were so much better than everyone else last season.
A week before the Premier League season kicks off, I've ranked who I expect to be the top 50 players in the Premier League this season. What do I mean by "best"? How did the list shake out? And, oh my god, how did you not list the guy from my favorite team over that other guy from the team I hate?
Read on to find out.