How the MVP and the team of the week are chosen
No one picks; the maths does. Each player's contribution to their side winning is calculated rally by rally, and the week's largest contribution is the MVP. This is VolleyballTV's statistical pick, not the league's official award.
Data
Every match's rally-by-rally record: serve, reception, set, attack, block and dig; the quality of every touch (perfect, good, poor, error or point) and who made it.
Rallies whose record does not hold up against the official score are left out. Leagues without a touch record get no MVP of the week.
1. The worth of every touch
From every rally the league has played this season, we measure how often a side goes on to win the rally after each kind of touch. After a perfect reception, say, a side wins 68% of rallies; after a poor one, 45%.
A touch is read together with its side's previous touch: a good set off a poor reception is a different situation from a set off a perfect one. Situations with few examples are drawn toward the overall rate with a Bayesian mean (20 touches).
A touch is worth how much it changed its side's chance of winning the rally. A point takes it to 1, an error to 0.
Worth = P(after the touch) − P(before the touch)
2. Shared work
Setting: that the ball could be set at all is the reception's or the dig's doing. The setter is measured against the usual set off the same situation.
Block points: the point comes from the attacker hitting into the block and the blocker stopping it, together. An outcome two players make together is shared equally, by the Shapley value: the blocker gets half the point as a plus, the attacker half as a minus.
3. Replacement level
A player is measured not against the league average but against what the league's weakest fifth would do in the same job (among players with at least 10 touches of that skill in the season).
So a player who carries a heavy load at an average rate earns value too: had the side given those balls to a weaker player, it would have won less.
Contribution = Σ (touch worth − replacement level)
4. The match's importance
Team strength is an Elo rating computed from all of the league's results (K = 20; at a new season a third of the rating returns to the mean).
A match's importance is the harmonic mean of the two sides' strengths: a match between two strong sides counts most, a lopsided match less than an even one. Its effect is kept modest (square root; about 0.8 to 1.2) and applies to a player's whole contribution in that match.
Weight = √( H(strength₁, strength₂) ÷ league mean )
5. Selection
MVP of the week: among players who won their match and played at least 3 sets and 20 touches in the week, the one with the highest contribution per set. Contribution is divided by the sets played, so a player whose side won 3-0 does not fall behind one who played a long match. The team of the week uses the same measure.
Team of the week: each position competes within itself (setter, opposite, two outside hitters, two middle blockers, libero); players of winning sides come first. A player's position is taken from their club's official roster.
Ranking = Contribution ÷ sets played
What we deliberately do not do
No extra weight for clutch moments: a player's value is the sum of their work at every moment of the match. Those who shine in tight moments are told in the week's stories.
No separate opponent adjustment: touch values are computed from the rally situation, so the opponent's strength is already in them; on a full season of data a separate adjustment added nothing to the measurement.
No hand-set weights: we set the worth of no action; values come from each league's own data and are recalculated every week.