WPL Player Hub

Football roles are not comparable on one universal stat line — asking a centre‑back to out‑score a striker on goals, or a striker to out‑score a defender on clearances, produces a "Player of the Month" that is really just a top‑scorer table. Instead every player is scored within their own position group, on the stats that group is actually judged on, then the position winners are compared to pick one headline nominee.

1. Per-90 normalisation

Counting stats (recoveries, chances created, shots, etc.) are converted to a per‑90‑minutes rate before anything else, so a player who starts isn't penalised against one whose team made a late substitution, and a substitute's 20 hot minutes aren't inflated to look like a full match.

2. Minutes played — a floor and a scored metric

Minutes do three separate jobs here. They're the per-90 divisor in step 1 (converting volume to a rate); they set a 45-minute eligibility floor, so players under 45 minutes appear in the full roster but are excluded from ranking and awards; and they are scored in their own right, worth 10% of every position's composite. That last one matters because a per-90 rate on its own would score a 46-minute cameo exactly like the same output sustained across a full 90 — availability and minutes on the pitch are part of what makes a month, not just efficiency while out there. Minutes are deliberately the one metric left as a raw total rather than a per-90 rate, since rewarding volume is the entire point of including them.

3. Position-specific weighting

Each metric is min‑max scaled to 0–100 against the other eligible players in the same position group for the period, then combined using the weights below. Metrics marked (inverted) reward the lower value (fewer goals conceded, fewer fouls/cards).

Because every position's score lands on the same 0–100 scale, the Player Ratings → All Positions tab can rank every eligible player league‑wide on one list. This is a read of "how strong a game relative to positional peers", not a claim that the underlying stat lines are comparable — a forward's 82 and a defender's 82 are each a strong result for that role, not the same 82 points of output.

4. Data completeness

A metric that a source report didn't break out for a given player (for example, tackle‑win% isn't always published for every defender) is treated as 0 for that one metric rather than dropping the player — this can slightly understate an all-rounder whose specific contribution wasn't itemised in that report, and will average out as more matchday packs are added across the month.

5. Three separate awards, top 3 nominees, gated at 3 rounds

Player of the Month is drawn from the highest composite scores among eligible outfield players (defenders, midfielders, forwards) — goalkeepers are judged on a different job entirely, so they don't compete in the same pool. Goalkeeper of the Month is drawn from the GK leaderboard. Coach of the Month is scored separately, at the team level (below), since a manager's job is results and game management, not any single player's stat line. Each award always lists its top 3 ranked nominees rather than a single winner. The 3-round threshold controls whether that shortlist is official, not whether it's shown: until 3 full rounds of Matchday data are loaded (all 4 fixtures reported in each), every award card carries a Provisional flag and a note that names and order can still change, so an early, partial-data leader can't read as a locked-in result. Where the league hasn't yet produced 3 eligible candidates for an award — only two clubs have a reported fixture so far, so Goalkeeper and Coach of the Month currently have two — the card says how many slots are still unfillable rather than padding the list. The per-matchday position spotlights and the full Coach of the Month standings table further down are a different, always-on view of the current matchday's leaders — useful context, but not the nomination itself.

Each nominee carries the three stats that contributed most to their own score — each metric's 0–100 scaled value multiplied by its weight, ranked, top three. These are picked by the maths, not chosen by hand, so the card answers "why is this player nominated?" with the same numbers the ranking actually used, which is what makes it safe to lift into a public fan-vote post. Metrics that contributed nothing are left out: a nominee who only makes the list because the eligible pool is still small would otherwise have its worst numbers displayed as "top stats", so those cards say plainly that no metric separated them this round instead.

6. Coach of the Month — team-level scoring

Only clubs with a confirmed Matchday 1 report are scored (no minutes threshold at team level, but a club with no reported fixture has nothing to score). Each metric is min‑max scaled 0–100 across the reported clubs, then combined using the weights below. There's no "Performance vs xG" metric this matchday — the OptaPro match report this data comes from doesn't publish an Expected Goals figure, so rather than estimate one, its weight has been folded into the other metrics below. It'll come back once a source with real per-match xG is available. A Home win bonus has also been added, worth 15% of the score, per league guidance that a home win should carry extra weight in this award — it scores 1 for a club that both hosted its reported fixture and won it, 0 for an away win, draw, loss, or a fixture whose venue isn't yet known.

Disciplinary points aren't published as a standalone figure in this report either, so they're computed with the same formula used for each player's own discipline metric: fouls committed + yellow cards × 2 + red cards × 4, taken from the match report's Team Data page. Clubs without a reported fixture show as "not yet reported" on the Coach of the Month table rather than being scored on zeros. With only two clubs reported so far, min‑max scaling naturally produces a stark 100 vs 0 split — that's an artefact of a two-team cohort, not a claim that the runner-up did everything wrong, and it will settle into a more graduated spread once more clubs' Matchday 1 reports are added.

7. Team of the Week

Team of the Week reuses the exact same position-weighted composite scores from sections 1–3 above rather than a separate scoring system. With 8 clubs and 4 fixtures per round, the XI is picked in a fixed 4‑4‑2 shape — the single top scorer at goalkeeper, the top 4 among defenders, the top 4 among midfielders and the top 2 among forwards, league‑wide, with no cap on how many players can come from one club (an even, uncapped talent-pool read was preferred over a per-club quota). While fewer than all 4 of the round's fixtures have a confirmed match report, the XI is shown as provisional, since a not-yet-scored club could still out-perform a player currently holding a slot; it's marked final once every fixture in the round is in.

8. What the 2025/26 back-test showed

The weights above were re-run across the whole of last season — 56 matches, 1,597 player-match records — to see how they behave on a full dataset rather than a single fixture. Two findings matter.

Coach of the Month holds up well at scale. Run over the completed season, it ranks Al Nassr top on 99.0, and Al Nassr were champions by twelve points. The scores spread smoothly from 99.0 down to 10.0 across the eight clubs, which also confirms that the stark 100‑vs‑0 split visible on the current season's board is purely an artefact of scoring a two-club cohort, not a flaw in the weighting.

The goalkeeper weights have a real problem, and it is worth fixing before this award is given. Because Saves per 90 carries 22%, the metric rewards volume of saves — and volume mostly tracks how exposed a keeper's defence is. Run on last season, the formula puts Eastern Flames' keeper second in the league despite her conceding 59 goals, the most of anyone, and keeping no clean sheets; she made 122 saves because she faced 336 shots. Meanwhile the champions' keeper, who conceded 12 and kept three clean sheets, comes seventh of eight. Shifting weight away from save volume and towards save percentage, goals conceded and a clean-sheet rate (roughly 30/25/15, with saves cut to 8%) moves her down to fifth and lifts Al Hilal's keeper from sixth to third — a more defensible order. That change is not yet applied to the live weights above; it is a recommendation awaiting sign-off, since it materially changes who wins the award.

Player of the Month and Team of the Week could not be back-tested the same way: the match reports publish per-player statistics but not each player's position, and the formation graphic layers substitutes over starters, so position could only have been guessed. Rather than back-test against invented positions, that part is left open — see the note on granular positions in the project's methodology doc.

Radar / comparison axes

The Compare tab uses five general-purpose axes computed the same way for every position (Attacking, Creativity, Passing, Defending, Discipline) so a defender and a forward can be placed on one chart — this is a different, simpler calculation than the position-weighted award score above, meant for eyeballing playing styles rather than ranking.