2023-24 Tottenham Player Ratings: Season in Review

Good morning, Tottenham fans! Last year when the season had wrapped up and we were all collectively in our metaphorical cups over what a garbage fire the season turned out to be, a reader whom I can’t remember now asked whether there was any cumulative data over the stupid player ratings articles I’d been posting up to that point.

That sounds like a great idea, I replied, and also something that would require preparation, foresight, and work, none of which I did.

Well guess what: this year I did the work. I assiduously entered player ratings on a five point scale for (nearly) every Tottenham Hotspur Premier League match this season in a Google Sheet, and I’m going to share that data with all of you. I thought it would be interesting to see which players we — masthead and commentariat — have collectively rated the highest, which the lowest, and maybe where the opinion of the masthead and community have varied in our ratings.

The full spreadsheet is too long and cumbersome to embed in an article, so I’ll just post the summary columns here. But if you’re interested in looking at the full data, you can view it here.

Analysis

First, some caveats. The data is complete EXCEPT for the community ratings for the Chelsea match at Stamford Bridge, which I missed due to surgery. That’s probably not super statistically significant, though if anything the numbers might tick down slightly for everyone considering how that particular match went, so.

Also, there’s a decent amount of “squish” when you compare masthead numbers and community numbers. The nature of polling means that you will see a LOT fewer 5.0s, even rounded, given out by the community, because the rest of the bulk results will naturally drag them down. The masthead is therefore freer to give higher ratings than the commentariat. C’est la vie, but take it into consideration.

Finally, there are a bunch of players who played games who didn’t receive ratings, and those are obviously not represented on the chart. So this should be viewed as tracking performance of players who played enough minutes to receive a rating (again, a rather squishy metric but this is hardly a scientific poll).

Just looking at the raw data, the masthead consistently rated Micky van de Ven, Rodrigo Bentancur, and Cuti Romero the highest for their performances. The community rated Micky, Romero, and Guglielmo Vicario the highest in the aggregate. By contrast, both the masthead and community kinda hated Oliver Skipp (2.7 vs. 2.9) but notably the community never rated Skipp lower than 2.0.

If you look at the standard deviation column (ST/DEV), it suggests the community thought Vicario was the most consistent performer with more than 13 matches over the course of the season. By contrast, the masthead had Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg as the most consistent regular performer... consistently “meh” by his overall rather blah ratings.

Nearly every single player had at least one stinker of a performance where the masthead rated them 2.0 (or lower... without ruining the bit). In fairness, there were a couple of matches that were bad enough that the masthead ratings were phoned in, so again — grain of salt, “squish,” etc. Notably, the community quite liked Ben Davies — he never received a rating lower than 3.0, though he only played 13 matches. Likewise, Vicario, Hojbjerg, and Richarlison never had a community rating lower than 2.5.

In general, there wasn’t too much deviation between the masthead and the community this season. I think I expected a greater deviation in the numbers (probably based on the comments yelling at me for masthead ratings in the ratings articles every week) but the numbers in aggregate kind of balance everything out. In truth, we were pretty closely aligned, and that feels kinda nice.

Hope you enjoyed this, because it was a hell of a lot of work! We’ll continue our post-season coverage later today.