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Has Messi conceded 5 goals in a match being a defender? Has he not won any man of the match award in the World Cup till now? No? Then he’s not going to be featured in the list of ten best players at the world cup according to Castrol Index. The icing on the cake is that this bewildering rating system has FIFA’s approval.Now Castrol comes up with their ‘obective and fair’ rating system in pretty much everything. My first brush with Castrol Index was in some T20 World Cup I was watching when it was splashed all over the major cricket sites and portals. Then also, I failed to understand it(just like the D/L method) and even now I don’t have the slightest idea how this ‘honest’ rating of players is calculated. Bless the heavens for Castrol have come up with a video, making it easier for us, the lesser humans to decipher the mystery of the Bermuda triangle index.
According to the video, Castrol have come up with latest technology to analyze every move a player makes on the field. There is a mobile battery kind of meter with red and green signalling negative and positive impacts by a move. As if this isn’t complex enough, Castrol introduces the ‘key-factor’ in determining the impact of the action taken by a player based on the zone of the pitch the action takes place in.
For this, the pitch is divided into imaginary zones, coloured in varying shades of green and marked distinctly as concentric semicircles by imaginay, ‘tropic of cancer-ish’ lines reminiscent of a school athletics ground. So basically a player collects points based on the passes, tackles, interception and loses them for misplaced passes,mistimed tackles and anything that causes a negative impact to his team’s game.On paper, the idea looks solid but the most baffling thing about this method is how it failed to recognize Lionel Messi as one of the ten best players in the World Cup so far when he has managed to bag the man of the match award in every single match he has played. What’s more confusing is how Djourou is ranked 9th in this index when he was there when France slipped 5 goals past his team’s defence. Anyway, neither FIFA nor Castrol are going to change anything about their ratings system so here are the best players according to Castrol Index:
According to Castrol, these ratings offer a completely different perspective to football and tell us which players actually deserve to be in the headlines. I, on the other hand, am not so sure about the credibility of this rating after their latest release.
| 1 | DAVID LUIZ | Defender | 9.79 | |
| 2 | James RODRIGUEZ | Midfielder |  COL | 9.74 |
| 3 | Karim BENZEMA | Forward |  FRA | 9.7 |
| 4 | Arjen ROBBEN | Forward |  NED | 9.66 |
| 5 | Jan VERTONGHEN | Defender |  BEL | 9.62 |
| 6 | NEYMAR | Forward | 9.59 | |
| 7 | Thiago SILVA | Defender | 9.56 | |
| 8 | Ivan PERISIC | Midfielder |  CRO | 9.53 |
| 9 | Johan DJOUROU | Defender |  SUI | 9.5 |
| 10 | Thomas MUELLER | Forward |  GER | 9.48 |
