Conventional sports wisdom says soccer, unlike baseball, gridiron football, or cricket, has fewer statistically quantifiable elements to collect than other sports, and therefore invites more than its fair share of subjective opinions over objective, declarative “facts.”

While this view has changed somewhat in the last few years with the rise of Opta statistical data and other sabermetric-like means used to measure everything from kilometers run to completed forward pass percentages (as this Simon Kuper piece from last June illustrates), few would agree that we’ve managed to find a means to make soccer as fact-friendly as other, particularly North American, sports.

Soccer flows, formations change throughout the game, tactical plans and heat maps are undone with one, split-second moment of madness, like a poor back pass or a slip on the grass (or both, in the case of John Terry). Players, brilliant one moment, will make horrendous errors the next. The game spurs newspaper match reports that regularly veer away from “x’s and o’s” style sports talk toward poetry, and prevents even the most thorough tactical analysts from making definitive, across the board pronouncements without looking like fools. Soccer is wonderfully, maddeningly ineffable, and we like it that way.

Or at least most of us do. In an article highlighted to me by blogger Futfanatico, the New York Times’ John Godfrey finds a solution in search of a problem:

With soccer, the typical stat sheet reveals some very basic information – who scored, how many saves the goalkeepers made, which players received yellow and red cards – but unless you watched the match or read longer news reports you probably would not know if a defensive midfielder dominated the center of the field or if a striker flubbed several easy chances.

This is where soccer player ratings – the practice in which “experts” score individual performances on a scale of 1-10 – come into play. These ratings first appeared in England in the late 1970s according to this source, and continue to this day at least in part because soccer lacks the sort of in-depth statistical data so common in other sports.

The Goal blog publishes player ratings. SI.com does it. So do ESPN.com,Goal.com and others.

The biggest problem with evaluating players in this manner, of course, is the inherent subjectivity. Two qualified pundits sitting side-by-side in the same press box could grade the same individual quite differently – and they often do.

But what if you aggregated multiple player ratings from a half-dozen or more sources and created composite scores for players? Would these numbers be more reliable? Would patterns emerge that could provide insights into player performance trajectories?

What Godfrey essentially proposes is that by aggregating a group of journalist player ratings, you’ll somehow end up closer to the “objective” truth of how a player performed in the course of a game. Which is false. What you’re in fact doing is finding the average subjective impression of a small group of so-called “experts” on how a particular player fared on the day.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s certainly no more “objective” than any other metric by which to judge how a player fared in a football match. But that’s not what bugs me; rather, it’s the idea that “inherently subjective” opinions, taken by themselves, are somehow without value.

To give you an idea of what I mean, take the wide spread praise Laurent Koscielny received for his performance against Marseille in Arsenal’s “first leg” in the Champions League group stage back in October. The announcers said he was the best player on the pitch, then Twitter agreed, and then the MBM writers slotted it in, then the proper journo match reports said it, too.

But if you examine the available statistical data from Opta, it’s not clear the defender had a standout match. He attempted one, unsuccessful tackle. He made four out of five successful clearances, fewer than both Souleymane Diawara and Per Mertesacker. His pass completion rate lagged far behind Mertesacker’s. He did however exceed in interceptions, with the second highest number in the game at seven.

Does that mean the pundits and fans were somehow wrong? Not at all. But it’s possible there were several factors beyond the objective data of Koscielny’s performance on the night that influenced the pundits decision to hail him as man of the match (and not Per Mertesacker, for example). There was the fact the game was his first Arsenal start of the 2011-12 season in the Champions League, coming on for the injured Thomas Vermaelen. He was also under scrutiny for a pair of poor performances against Manchester United and Blackburn. It was also Arsenal’s first clean sheet away in the Champions League since August 2009.

Beyond that though, there were more ethereal qualities on display, his determination, his aura of competence. Take this pundit’s view, for example:

 “You saw in that game what we want from Laurent – he was commanding and playing with authority. That is something that has come out of the game last night.

“When he had the ball he was calm, he read the game well and got in front of the strikers to save many dangerous situations.”

That was Arsene Wenger, with as subjective a reading of Koscielny’s impact as you’ll find, and just as impossible to “objectively” demonstrate. This is what bugs me about Godfrey’s project: it’s the assertion that the “inherently subjective” opinions have no value in sport. Along with reliable statistical data and tactical plans, these subjective impressions matter in football, are crucial in fact.

Because it’s wrong to assume that because something is inherently subjective in sports it can’t be also be true. Not that any opinion can ever be absolutely true in all possible worlds, but “absolute truth” in sport is a mirage, an illusion (contrary to the know-it-all trolls that plague sports blogs around the world). Those who would attempt to find a short-cut to truth in football (or sport), either by over-reliance on Opta data, or by aggregating all the opinions together and finding the average as Godfrey proposes, are moving further from it.