England demolished Croatia 6-0 in Rijeka on a night when the football was so good it felt almost criminal. Six goals. One team. Zero excuses. And yet here we are, staring into the abyss of a question that has haunted humanity since someone invented the number system: who was the best player?
This is the paradox of modern sport. We produce transcendent performances—the kind that should unite us in uncomplicated joy—and immediately fragment into a desperate search for numerical validation. Did Harry Kane deserve an 8.2 or an 8.1? Was the left-back who barely touched the ball but made two crucial interceptions a 7.4 or a 7.6? We are, essentially, asking computers to measure the unmeasurable, then arguing about the decimal places.
The ratings system has become what it was always destined to be: a mirror held up to our need to quantify everything, to reduce human performance to a number that fits in a database, to answer the unanswerable with precision. A 6-0 victory should feel like liberation. Instead, it feels like a data entry problem waiting to be solved.
England played brilliantly. Croatia did not. The scoreline is honest. The ratings, however, will spawn a thousand Reddit threads debating whether a player who scored twice and created one deserves a 9.1 or a 9.2, as if the difference means anything beyond our collective anxiety about knowing exactly where we stand.
We won. Spectacularly. And we’re still not satisfied until we’ve rated it to death.