How can you know if a tournament's age group divisions have been well-structured and balanced? Sometimes, you can find the answer in the game results data...
The Bethesda Premier Cup is recognized as a Top 5 Boys US Tournament. In the November 2025 event, 250 teams participated in the showcase-level age groups:
Using average goals scored per team per game (GF-G) is a useful metric to compare these age group / division permutations:
Inside these age groups, we're observing approx. <20% variances in goal-production across divisions. There's an exception inside the U18/19 Patriot Division - more on that below. Beyond this exception, tournament officials have structured teams into groups that reflect fairly-similar levels of game proficiency. For example:
- In the U16 age group, the tournament average GF-G is 1.30. The variance between the lowest/highest GF-G bracket is -17.6%.
- Said differently, the variance between the lowest/highest GF-G brackets and the average age group GF-G of 1.30 itself is less-than +/-10%.
- In our opinion, this data demonstrates that teams with similar strengths have been grouped into well-balanced divisions... where the ability to score is similar across these divisions.
Let's highlight: this data does not infer similar strength across divisions from the same age group. For example, it's likely that the average team inside the top U16 #1 Champions Division would produce much-higher GF-G against an average team inside the #5 U16 Liberty Division.
Coming back to the observed exception. Inside the U18/19 #4 Patriot Division, 18 out-of 98 total division goals (18.4%) were scored inside 2 out-of 48 in-division games (4.2%)... against the same team. This is indeed an outlier, but it's the only one across a 250-team tournament.
"Top 33%" Team Performances Inside Divisions & Age Groups
At SoccerAnalytix, we often segment tournament performances across Top, Mid and Base teams (ie: 1/3 slices). In this case, let's isolate how the Top 1/3 teams inside each division performed:
3 observations:
- Is it a coincidence that goal production increases in-relation to age?
- These top teams are scoring closer to ≈3 GF-G, higher than their respective entire-division GF-G averages.
- The GF-G variances inside these Top 33% division subsets are larger than what we observed within the entire-division GF-G averages.
As it relates to higher-performing teams, these larger variances are typical - which we can further dive-into in another post.
Club Performances Inside the Cup
In a tournament such as the Bethesda Premier Cup, it's obvious: clubs join-into the event with multiple age-group teams representing them. In fact, many clubs have a few teams inside a single age group - but they're competing inside different divisions.
Is club performance related to the number of teams it has nurtured into this tournament's Top 33% cohort? Consider this:
Coming soon - let's analyze MLS NEXT Fest December 2025 results!
By Richard - From SoccerAnalytix