Sports like baseball and basketball have what some fans call “all-in-one-numbers,” even though none of them are exactly all-in-ones. Be they wins above replacement or box plus-minus, win shares or, well, win shares, both sports have seen smart people try to come up with ways to encapsulate a player’s entire contributions, each trying to give us an idea of somebody’s relative (and in some cases, absolute) value.
It feels like soccer is a ways from those in having those types of measures, but within more narrow contexts, there are still attempts to look at parts of a player’s skill set terms of single numbers.