The moment that all U.S. men's national team fans have been waiting for is finally here.
After a summer of disappointment and managerial upheaval, we can all rejoice as we sit back and enjoy the first USMNT Player Performance Index of the 2024-25 European soccer season, and the first post-Copa America edition!
Now, you might be slightly more excited for something else coming down the pipeline: the USMNT's first two matches under their star new manager, Mauricio Pochettino. But before Poch & Co. take on Panama and Mexico in friendlies later this month, we've returned with our attempt to rank the best performing players in the entire American player pool.
This index looks at club performance for USMNT players, and we're still quite early in the season, but this will allow us to track USMNT players as we revisit these rankings periodically throughout the season. Trends will start to emerge, performances will start to solidify, stars will rise and fall, Gio Reyna will inevitably head into another January transfer window in need of a new club, and Tyler Adams -- hypothetically, theoretically, spiritually, and perhaps actually -- will begin to play professional soccer again.
We'll get to the top 50 ranking in a minute, but first: some details on the number-crunching that powers these rankings, plus some explanations on notable absences.
Which USMNT players are missing? And how does this ranking work?
Last year, we landed on a methodology that basically asked two questions: How good is a USMNT player's club team, and how much credit does the player deserve for that?
While there are all kinds of individual statistics out there, each one inevitably misses out on some vital context, and that context varies by position. The statistics we chose for this ranking are no exception, but together they miss out on a lot less than any other methodology we can come up with.
There are no playoffs in European soccer, so every minute you're not playing is a minute where you're not helping your team finish higher in the table. If you're playing a lot of minutes, it likely means your coach thinks you're playing well. And the better your team is, the more valuable the minutes you're providing are. Therefore, we designed a model that rewards players who play a lot, and who play for good teams.