Film · 2023 · Films · 2020s
Next Goal Wins
Scored from 128 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Based on the true story, washed-up American soccer coach Thomas Rongen is sent to American Samoa to train the national team, infamous for a record-breaking 31-0 loss. As he clashes with the laid-back island culture and his own demons, he works with the underdog squad - including pioneering fa'afafine player Jaiyah Saelua - in hopes of scoring their first-ever World Cup qualifier goal.
Next Goal Wins is a 2023 comedy, drama and sport film.
The calibrated figure is built from 128 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 133 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 180 of whom clear the calibration test.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Next Goal Wins lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2020s (7,930 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 128.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
