How Fabio Capello Rated His England Team According to Capello Index

It’s a bizarre story. First, in May, before the World Cup kicked off, Fabio Capello along with a man named Chicco Merighi launched the Capello Index, an objective system that measures and evaluates the performances of players. But after the news broke of the ratings system, many people thought it would be in poor taste to have the rankings system running during the World Cup. That included the Football Association (FA) who prevented Capello from running the index during the tournament.

But now that the tournament is over, the people behind the Capello Index launched the site this morning which reveals how poor the England footballers were rated.

However, “A spokesman from the FA said that the index ratings had not been seen or approved by Mr Capello, were published without his knowledge and that his representatives have taken immediate steps to have the material taken down.”

It’s a bit ridiculous, really. Why can’t Capello have an opinion about how the players in the 2010 World Cup were rated even if it includes his England team? Isn’t relatively objective data what it is, a reflection on how a player performed at the top level? Does it look bad that Capello is associated with the index? Perhaps it seems unbefitting of an England manager, perhaps.

Now supposedly Capello is trying to get the index removed from the Internet for fear of embarrassment (too late). So in case it gets wiped away, here’s more information about how the index works and how the England players were rated during the 2010 World Cup:

According to the Capello Index website, the Capello Index uses “a scoring system which takes account of every key event that occurs during the course of a match. The Capello Index has a unique formula that measures a player’s contribution from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The score a player’s action generates is weighted depending on a number of factors, such as the area of the pitch in which they are completed, their impact on the match and the importance of game.”

The England players were rated as follows (out of a score of 100):

Robert Green 51.67
David James 59.28
Glen Johnson 57.18
John Terry 60.48
Ledley King 57.50
Jamie Carragher 59.04
Matthew Upson 60.21
Ashley Cole 59.58
Aaron Lennon 57.64
Frank Lampard 58.58
Steven Gerrard 60.98
James Milner 59.40
Gareth Barry 57.50
Shaun Wright-Phillips 61.09
Joe Cole 55.45
Wayne Rooney 58.87
Emile Heskey 60.15
Jermain Defoe 62.47
Peter Crouch did not play enough minutes to generate a mark.

In comparison, Diego Forlan achieved the highest score in the 2010 World Cup with a rating of 65.77.

Jermain Defoe scored the highest rating of the tournament for England with a 62.47. Not surprisingly, Robert Green scored a 51.67 after playing just one game and making a fatal mistake although, in fairness, he did earn back some credibility when he saved Jozy Altidore’s shot in the same game against the United States.

In the meantime, you may want to surf the Capello Index website as much as possible this weekend before it’s removed. It’s a bit of a fuss about nothing, in my opinion. What do you think?