With the 2024 Major League Soccer season officially in the books, it's time to look back on the New York City FC player ratings handed out by the readers of Hudson River Blue.
You voted on player ratings after every single match this year, 43 in total: That includes 34 league games, 4 MLS Cup Playoff games, and 5 Leagues Cup games. It adds up to thousands of ratings for hundreds of performances, all carefully registered and cataloged by PricewaterhouseCoopers on a Google Sheet throughout the year.
Which brings us to the year-end NYCFC player ratings, in which we average all those numbers. We also look at the best (and worst performance) of the year by each player, and how many times they were voted Player of the Match.
A couple of observations. One, Matt Freese and Santiago Rodríguez not only lead the teams with 10 POTMs each, they lead the teams in starts, Freese with 42 and Rodríguez with 40. (Thiago Martins also made 40 starts.) Two, you're a tough audience: Your ratings were consistently lower than those handed out by the FotMob algorithm. Only your ratings for Freese and Malachi Jones were higher than FotMob's.
Three, the gutting home loss to Philadelphia Union at Yankee Stadium did more damage to the team's average than any other single game: Nine players earned their lowest rating of the year that night. Four, the team's stronger performances are distributed among a handful of games, including the wins over New York Red Bulls at Citi Field in May and at Red Bull Arena (now Sports Illustrated Stadium?!?) in September.
Former Head Coach Nick Cushing averaged just a 5.3 on the year, lower than everybody else here save for Mounsef Bakrar (5.2), the referees (5.0), Jovan Mijatović (4.6), and the recently-traded Luis Barraza (4.4).
Naturally, Raquinho makes an appearance in this season's wrap-up. The raccoon was the real star of New York City's away win at Philadelphia Union in May, and his 9.4 rating was the highest in HRB history until Alonso Martínez earned a 9.5 a few weeks later after scoring a hat-trick against San Jose Earthquakes as a sub.
That record stood until the second-to-last-game of the year, when you rewarded Matt Freese's goalkeeping heroics against FC Cincinnati in the MLS Cup Playoffs with a well-deserved 9.7.
Note: FotMob ratings are in parentheses.
