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We ran out of time for proper articles milking last season’s TFI for all we could, so time to unleash a torrent of terribly formatted tables for you to do with as you please.

Player Rankings

A table of our players and their contributions as judged by the TFI and sorted by their average rating. Players with less than 360 minutes played are excluded from the overall ranking. Mins/90 gives a rough number of full games that their minutes played equate to.

Man/Mug of the Match Awards

The highest and lowest rated players were awarded the Man of the Match and Mug of the Match awards respectively, so this is a table of our winners as well as their TFI ratings for said match and any goal/assist contributions.

A quick look at how many of each award players won.

Team Versus Pardew Ratings

This is a comparison of our team average ratings against Pardew’s ratings (from the point we started asking for them), with the idea being that when the former is subtracted from the latter, you get a sense of how much Pardew was blamed or credited compared to the players on the pitch.

Formation Stuff

These are the formations we used and our average team ratings while using them.

Found anything interesting in this mess? Have your say in our discussion thread here.

Click here to go to the discussion thread by Cal

The new season looms and we’ve exhausted what we could of the TFI database in this last few weeks, but we’ve saved our best/worst XIs, as determined by the season average TFI ratings of each player, for last. We covered the best XI in our last post, so here’s the worst.

We’ve had to drop the minimum minutes requirement for a starting role from 450 to 360 for this one, as otherwise we’d have no goalkeeper or there would be overlap with our best XI. Players below 360 minutes only allowed to be selected as one of the three used subs.

Our worst rated formation was used in just one match, the loss to Stoke at the Britannia, which is probably enough information for you to remember that it’s Pardew’s dreaded 5-3-2, which earned an average team rating of 4.84. If it wasn’t for this tactical travesty, we’d be going for the 4-4-1-1 used for a streak of 6 games in 2014, as Pardew tried to get the best out of Luuk de Jong by playing him out of position (he recently complained to the press about this, and is scoring for his new club), which averaged 5.07.

Again, taking the eleven players from one extreme of our rankings, we were able to put together something which could conceivably have been a Pardew line-up, with Gouffran having recently played centrally making things a little easier, while Shola has ended up as a winger/full-back late on during a match.

This time the subs all did not make the minimum minute requirement to be selected in the starting XI, although Vučkić and Obertan were our lowest rated players of the season, while Armstrong was perhaps unlucky that his only rating was for 16 minutes in the dire Stoke game.

You can click on the players’ names to go to their TFI pages.

Do you agree with this side? What would you change about it? Have your say in our discussion thread here.

Click here to go to the discussion thread by Cal

With the new season on the horizon, it’s time for us to wrap up our look back at 13/14 with our final pair of examinations; the best/worst XIs as determined by the season average TFI ratings of each player. In this post we’re revealing the best XI, and unsurprisingly it’s very similar to the side from our best team performance.

As in our best/worst five players, only players who have played at least 450 minutes are eligible for selection in a starting role, but we have allowed for players below that limit on the bench, especially as otherwise we’d have a bit of overlap between the teams since only 23 players met that criteria, and we’re using 11+3 players per team.

Our first order of business was deciding on the formation. Luckily, we have been tracking formations used each match and their corresponding team ratings. In first place was 4-3-3 with an average team rating of 6.16 in the 10 times it was used, while 4-4-2 took second with a 6.05 rating over 11 games.

We then took our top 11 players and tried to match them up with their natural positions in this formation, with priority of course going to the higher rated player. It almost fit together perfectly, however we were missing a centre-back and Sissoko (rank #10) had nowhere to go, so he was dropped to the bench for Coloccini (rank #12). Good and Bigirimana, both of whose only involvement was to play the full match against Morecambe, were the two players skipped over due to not having enough minutes played, so they made up the rest of the subs used in this hypothetical side.

You can click on the players’ names to go to their TFI pages.

Do you agree with this side? What would you change about it? Have your say in our discussion thread here.

Click here to go to the discussion thread by Cal

We’ve looked at our top five players of last season, now to delve the depths of depravity to discover who was deemed to have disappointed most. For this pair of top fives we have excluded players who had played less than 450 minutes of football in the season, but you can find those were on track to make this list at the end. We operate with a baseline rating of 5.50.

Note: Minutes played don’t include injury time, and we use our own definition of what constitutes an assist. Rather than just the last team-mate to touch the ball other than the goalscorer, we also give credit where a player clearly created the opportunity, even if the opposition touched the ball, which is more in line with FIFA’s 1986 criteria.

#5 Paul Dummett – 5.06

Average Rating: 5.06 (σ 1.33)
Best Rating: 7.73
Worst Rating: 2.80
Man of the Match: 0
Mug of the Match: 2 – Hull City (a), Everton (h)
Playing Time: 12 starts, 8 subs, ~1355 mins
Goals: 1 –
Assists: 1 –
Cards:

After making his Premier League debut by coming on as a substitute for the second half of our embarrassment to Man City on the first day of the season, Dummett was one of the few players to come out of the match with any credit, attaining the highest rating of our outfield players. He continued to impress in his next few appearances, two starts in the league cup and a second half appearance against Liverpool, again following a senior centre-back earning a red card, where he became our only English-born league goalscorer of the season, until Taylor got one in the second last game of the campaign.

Following that high point he was called upon for his full Premier League debut, out of position partnering Williamson at centre-back at the Stadium of Light, where he was completely out of his depth and/or overwhelmed by the occasion, putting up no resistance to Fletcher as he scored after just five minutes, setting the tone for much of the rest of the Newcastle-born Welshman’s season. Three days later he was brought on for extra-time against Man City in the cup, and they scored two goals in that half hour with Dummett being rated our second worst outfield player.

Dummett didn’t see action again until the new year, making a brief cameo against West Ham before, again, facing Sunderland, this time as a substitute and in his right position, but he was ripped to shreds by Adam Johnson. From here he featured in all but a single game for the rest of the season, as Santon struggled with a mix of injury and falling out of favour. In this period he had a single good game, away against Hull where he got an assist and a 6.34 rating, but this was still the lowest rating on the team. There are two low points that stand out in this run, a 2.80 rating in the 0-3 loss to Everton as Deulofeu embarrassed him time and time again, and the final game of the season, where he came on as a sub and was sent off five minutes later, albeit incorrectly.

Lowest rated performance: 2.80 in 0-3 vs Everton (h)

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We finally get to stop putting “performances” in the title as we enter what will likely be our last pair of top/worst five articles for this season; the players themselves. Some of these ratings might seem a little on the low side, but remember that we operate with a baseline rating of 5.50, so high ratings are quite rare, for example only 16 out of 42 games had any ratings over 8.00.

Note: Minutes played don’t include injury time, and we use our own definition of what constitutes an assist. Rather than just the last team-mate to touch the ball other than the goalscorer, we also give credit where a player clearly created the opportunity, even if the opposition touched the ball, which is more in line with FIFA’s 1986 criteria.

#5 Loïc Rémy – 6.15

Average Rating: 6.15 (σ 1.49)
Best Rating: 8.35
Worst Rating: 3.00
Man of the Match: 2 – Hull City (h), Cardiff City (a)
Mug of the Match: 1 – Southampton (h)
Playing Time: 24 starts, 3 subs, ~2093 mins
Goals: 14 –
Assists: 3 –
Cards:

Our first entry in this list is last season’s successful loanee, Loïc Rémy, who may or may not be returning to the club this month, depending on whether either party finds something better while he’s stalling. It’s a little surprising that he’s only fifth on this list, but when he wasn’t scoring goals he was judged to be doing very little of value, leading to a lot of high and low ratings with not too much in the middle.

Rémy missed the first few games of the season through injury, and then was eased back over two games before making his home debut in some style, scoring two goals from the left to earn man of the match despite the rest of the team not showing up in the 2-3 loss to newly promoted Hull. This was the start of the good run of form that saw the Frenchman net eight times in seven starts.

Entering December things slowed down a bit and apart from a hard-working display at Old Trafford, Rémy’s ratings dropped too in what would set the pace for the much of rest of his season; periods of poor play punctuated by the odd burst of goals. His only goals in December came in the form of a brace during the 5-1 demolition of Stoke, and then in January he only scored a single goal, this time against West Ham. The following game saw a good but unlucky performance, in which he hit the woodwork twice, marred by a late red card.

After the three game suspension was served, Rémy returned in scoring form, however two games and two goals later he would be out of action again, this time suffering an injury on international duty that ruled him out for almost two months when we needed him most as we struggled to find the net in the absence of our two top scorers, while our third (Gouffran) didn’t score at all after Boxing Day. He featured three more times after that, all receiving low ratings, even his final game, in which he notched up a goal and an assist before sitting out the Liverpool match.

Highest rated performance: 8.35 in 2-1 vs Cardiff City (a)

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