so how do those soccer rankings work anyway?
In a nut shell, virtually every tournament played in the soccer world is run through Got Soccer which handles all of the registration logistics and hosts the game schedules and bracket results. Since every team must log into the Got Soccer system in order to register, each team is allocated a unique record which tracks every single game they play under the Got Soccer system. Therefore, wins, losses, and draws are carefully recorded at the tournament level and used to rank teams going forward. (Older records "decay" and have less value than more recent records.)
Since each tournament is weighted in terms of points (and adjusted based on the teams that partake), better performances earn more points. Tally up the points for each team within an age group and you have a ranking of the teams.
Now, since each subsequent tournament (regardless of vendor) refers to these rankings when bracketing registered teams, the brackets wind up being uniformly competitive in most circumstances.
There are more subtle points here (including point values for multiple brackets and where a lower bracket winner is worth more points than an upper bracket zero-win team), but those special cases only detract from the discussion.
The key is that GOT SOCCER's value proposition was in providing a tournament organization and registration service - which later became a heavyweight and honest ranking system. To be honest, the soccer world will argue about the relative point values of different tournaments, but that greatly moves the discussion forward over the currently unbalanced brackets seen in lacrosse.
Hope that this helps.
