The yearly ritual of reputation-based benchmarking

The EFL just dropped their Teams of the Season, and it is exactly what we expected: a complete mess of reputation bias, highlight-reel thirst, and the footballing equivalent of a model overfit on training data from three years ago. If you spent your morning looking at the Sky Sports reveal and didn't immediately want to throw your phone into a canal, you haven't been paying attention. It is the same old story every single April. The voters look at the top of the table, find the guys with the most Instagram followers or the highest transfer value on some random spreadsheet, and call it a day. It’s like ranking LLMs based solely on their marketing departments rather than their actual inference speed or reasoning capabilities.

We are seeing a massive systemic failure in how we evaluate talent in the lower leagues. The Championship XI is essentially a 'who's who' of players who are too good for this division but are stuck here because of FFP constraints or bad luck. There is zero room for the grinders, the tactical pivots, or the players who actually make their teams functional without needing a ten-minute montage of step-overs. We’ve reached a point where the 'Team of the Season' is just a wishlist for Premier League scouts rather than a reflection of who actually dominated the 46-game slog. It is loud, it is wrong, and it is peak EFL.

The Championship bias and the death of the defensive mid

Look at the midfield selections in the Championship. It is always three guys who want to play as a number ten. We are basically playing a 4-0-6 formation at this point. Nobody wants to acknowledge the guy who sits in front of the back four, breaking up play and recycling possession with 92% accuracy while everyone else is busy trying to score a 30-yard screamer for the social media team. It is the 'vibes over variables' approach to scouting. We are valuing the flashy outliers and ignoring the baseline performance that actually wins titles.

The snub of the league's best holding midfielders is a recurring bug in the system. If you aren't providing an 'assist for the assist' or doing something that looks good in a slow-motion replay, the EFL voters act like you don't exist. It’s like judging a model's efficiency without looking at the token-per-second cost. Sure, the output looks pretty, but you’re burning through your entire defensive budget just to sustain it. We see teams at the top of the Championship who are fundamentally broken at the back, yet their defenders make the XI because they happen to play for a club that scores four goals a game. It is intellectual laziness of the highest order.

League One and the goal-scoring obsession

Moving down to League One, the situation gets even more ridiculous. The 'Team of the Season' is essentially just the top three goalscorers and whoever the loudest fanbases on Twitter decided was 'clear' of everyone else. There is a total lack of nuance. You could have a center-back who has won 80% of his aerial duels and hasn't been dribbled past since October, but if he hasn't scored three headers from corners, he’s invisible. The voting block is effectively hallucinating a version of the season that only exists in the box scores. They aren't watching the Tuesday night games in damp stadiums; they’re watching the 90-second highlights on their lunch breaks.

The exclusion of actual playmakers in favor of 'shot merchants' is the real crime here. We are seeing players with incredible underlying metrics—expected assists, progressive passes, successful switches under pressure—get passed over for guys who tapped in five rebounds. It is the footballing version of a benchmark that only tests for memorization. If you can’t generalize your skills or contribute to the build-up, you shouldn't be in an elite XI, regardless of how many penalties you’ve tucked away. The League One list is a testament to how much we value the end product over the process, and in a league as chaotic as that one, the process is everything.

The League Two wild west and the 'Big Club' tax

League Two is where the real scouting should happen, but instead, it’s just a graveyard for logic. The 'Big Club' tax is more prevalent here than anywhere else. If you play for a team that recently dropped out of League One or has a massive historical stadium, you are 50% more likely to make the Team of the Season regardless of your actual output. It’s reputation-based RLHF. The voters have been conditioned to think that players at 'big' clubs are better, so they reinforce that bias every time they fill out a ballot. It’s a closed-loop system of mediocrity that ignores the actual breakout stars at smaller, more efficient outfits.

We are seeing kids on loan from Premier League academies get the nod over seasoned professionals who have been the bedrock of their teams' success. Why? Because the kid from the Chelsea or Man City academy has a 'high ceiling' and a recognizable name. It’s the ultimate scout’s trap. We’re voting on potential instead of performance. In a league that is famously physical and demanding, picking a lightweight winger who had one good month in February over a veteran who hasn't missed a minute of football is an insult to the competition. It’s like choosing a beta model with a fancy name over a stable, production-ready system because the beta model might, one day, be better.

A critical look at the 'Data-Driven' defense

The EFL tries to defend these picks by claiming they use 'data' and 'expert panels.' Please. If this was truly data-driven, we wouldn't have the same statistical anomalies appearing year after year. The 'experts' are usually just former players who haven't stepped foot in a League Two stadium in a decade. Their 'eye test' is about as reliable as a first-generation chatbot trying to write poetry. It feels human, it sounds confident, but it’s full of errors that anyone with a brain can see. They are looking for the 'feel' of a player rather than the reality of their contribution to the win-loss column.

The most negative observation I can make—and there are many—is that these awards have become entirely detached from the reality of the promotion race. You will see players from mid-table teams make the XI while the most vital cogs in a promotion-winning machine are left out because they aren't 'marketable.' It turns the entire season into a beauty pageant. If you aren't playing the 'right' way or playing for the 'right' team, your 4,000 minutes of elite-level output don't matter. It’s a slap in the face to the tactical discipline that actually wins this league. We are rewarding the flashy failures and ignoring the quiet winners.

Why we need to scrap the current voting model

The current system is broken because it lacks accountability. There is no feedback loop. The voters make their picks, the graphics get posted, the fans argue for 24 hours, and then we all move on. There is no retrospective on how many of these 'Team of the Season' players actually go on to have successful careers or how many of them were just statistical blips. We need a model that weights performance against the quality of opposition, the importance of the match, and the tactical role within the team. We need the footballing equivalent of a rigorous, red-teamed benchmark.

Until we move away from this popularity contest, these lists will remain irrelevant. They are fun for a bit of engagement on social media, but as an actual metric for quality, they are worthless. We are rewarding the 'main characters' of the EFL drama rather than the best actors. It’s time to stop treating these lists like they mean something and start treating them like what they are: a collective hallucination by people who are too busy looking at their phones to watch the actual game. The EFL deserves better, the players deserve better, and the fans certainly deserve better than a 'best of' list that looks like it was generated by a malfunctioning algorithm.