This week in the ‘Newsletter’, tennis and numbers.
Tennis player Carlos Alcaraz has enjoyed a dazzling rise to the top of the men’s team. He started 2022 in 32nd place in the official ATP rankings, and in five months he climbed to sixth place. It can also get even better: In Elo-like rankings, which are more meaningful, the 19-year-old has already taken first or second place. Perhaps he is the best tennis player of the moment.
Elo rankings have become the standard metric in many sports to gauge strength from results. It is an original chess scoring system that is updated with each duel: if a tennis player loses to a theoretically superior rival, his score hardly goes down – because his loss was expected – but if he wins, his score jumps.
Jumping is what Alcaraz did. In the graphic I show the development of the latest Elo ranking from Ultimate Tennis Statistics. A year ago, the young tennis player was ranked 80th in the world, but then his rise began:
Alcaraz increased its ranking in summer 2021; he won the Umag tournament and jumped to 40th place; in September he played at the US Open, reached the quarterfinals and defeated world no. 3 Stéfanos Tsitsipas – earning him many points – and made it to 22nd in the world ahead of Elo. In November he won the Next Generation tournament and finished the year in 10th place.
Let’s zoom in to see its trajectory in 2022:
Since February, the 19-year-old tennis player has been practically unbeatable: he has only lost two games out of 27 played. He won the tournament in Rio de Janeiro, reached the semifinals of Indian Wells and then won on clay in Barcelona and Madrid. In these last two tournaments, he defeated four of the top five tennis players: Rafa Nadal (2,415 rating), Tsitsipas (2,318), Alexander Zverev (2,307) and Nolan Djokovic (2,442). That winning streak has made him the second-highest player in recent ratings, according to Ultimate Tennis Statistics, with 2,422 points.
Other variants of the Elo ranking also have it all. In Tennis Abstract they have been calculating their own Elo for years, and according to their calculations with slightly different parameters, Carlos Alcaraz would already be the best tennis player today. It is in general scoring and especially on clay. He is 40 points ahead of Djokovic in the world rankings, but is 130 ahead of him in the clay court standings.
I asked Tennis Abstract writer Jeff Sackmann for his numbers: Could Alcaraz have had a bit of luck? He explained to me that “young players can climb the Elo rankings very quickly” because the algorithm is designed to give more weight to their first matches, which contain a lot of information. And yes, “it’s possible that some Alcaraz result was lucky,” he admitted. For example, maybe he was lucky to play against Djokovic before he was 100% fit. “Distance [entre los dos] It’s not that big, so we could say Alcaraz is on Djokovic’s level, not that he’s a clear number one. But if he’s not already the best in the world, then he’s very close.”
Sackmann is not alone in this opinion. In the betting market, which generally predicts better than any other alternative, Nadal and Tsitsipas have a 15% to 20% chance of winning Roland Garros, but the favorites are Djokovic and Alcaraz, who are almost tied on points, with a chance of 100% each 30%
💯 2. Rating in other sports
- On Saturday, Barcelona play Lyon in the Women’s Champions League final, and according to this Elo ranking from earlier in the year, it’s the best game to watch.
- The men’s final? It is played in a week by Liverpool, who are the best result according to Clubelo, and Madrid, who are currently third. The madridistas have moved up two places with their victories in the quarter-finals and semi-finals, passing Chelsea and Bayern but still have Manchester City ahead despite beating them.
- The FIFA team rankings changed a few years ago to be Elo type (and thus better than before). According to this classification, the best men’s teams are Brazil, France and Belgium, with Spain in seventh place; and the best in the female category are the USA, Sweden and France, with Spain once again taking seventh place.
- If we go to the original rating, the best chess player in the world is Norwegian Magnus Carlsen.
📔 3. Some details
Elo rankings are used to measure strength based on results, taking into account the quality of a player or team’s rivals. This is its main advantage. Of course, if you win a match, you will get more points if you beat an opponent who was theoretically much better than you (because if you won, you are probably better than expected; your position needs to be higher and the opponent’s updated, below). On the other hand, if you lose to a superior player, your ranking will change little because it was expected. It is the surprise that moves the Elo. This rating mechanism allows you to compare players or teams that do not often play each other, such as football teams from different leagues.
The other advantage of the Elo is that they are formulated in such a way that, given the score of two teams, we can convert them into the probability of one winning and the other in the event of a duel. This is useful in itself for making predictions, and it also serves to adjust the parameters of the model itself: choosing the values that make it as predictable as possible.
The most obvious limitation of these systems is that they only care about past results: everything else is ignored. If you want to know more, we used an Elo rating at the last European Championship and also at the 2018 World Championship.
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