Seattle win, but our index splits 3.3 points with the reference over Thomas

Sebastian Gomez owns the top of our board: a 7.8 Pred1x Grade from just 45 minutes, per-90 normalized, ahead of Jackson Ragen's 7.3 as Seattle Sounders FC edged Sporting Kansas City 2-1 at Lumen Field. The reference rating agreed on the summit at 8.2, but the real story sits between Seattle's posts.

That 3.3-point chasm is the widest split of the night, and it is not close. The reference all but crowned Andrew Thomas at 8.7; our position-weighted, per-90 scale read the same 90 minutes and found box-score production that did not justify the applause. Sporting's Stefan Cleveland took a smaller haircut, 4.8 against 6.0 — our index is consistently cooler on keepers here.

We also docked the names the reference liked: Cristian Roldán 6.8 vs 7.9, André Luiz 6.7 vs 7.9, Daniel Musovski 4.8 against 6.4. Where the two systems converged — Gomez, Wyatt Meyer at 7.1 vs 7.3 — the grades barely moved. On this night, agreement was the exception.