After months of work, we're excited to debut something we're VERY excited about. Goals Added: A New Way to Measure Soccer! This is the first in a series of explainer articles we'll be releasing this week. So we hope you'll check this out and stay tuned!
We have two exciting articles today. First,
@etmckinley
's annual "State of MLS Analytics Tier List". More info here:
And, The 2023 MLS Analytics Survey, in which an anonymous survey was sent to the analytics staff of MLS clubs:
We now have an R and Python library, it's called itscalledsoccer!
Incredible work by
@TylerRichardett
& Brian Greenwood (with an assist from
@CozmoLAGalaxy
)
This is the first article of what we are terming "The Replication Project", in which we take an important soccer analytics finding from yesteryear and see if it still holds up with modern data.
First up,
@etmckinley
tackles
@11tegen11
's classic post:
In the first article of the "Replication Project", we noticed that xG fails to be as predictive of future results in MLS as it is in Europe.
Why is MLS such an outlier? Or is Europe the real outlier?
by
@SeanSteffen
@TiotalFootball
@etmckinley
What happens when you combine your current love of soccer with your childhood love of Pokemon?
@Thundering165
goes farther down this rabbit *ahem* I mean "Diglett" hole than any of us here at ASA expected.
Ever wondered Where Goals Come From? By breaking soccer down to basics,
@JmooreQuakes
and
@C_Carpenter14
have written a guide to provide clubs roadmap to success.
G+ is good. Alejandro Pozuelo is good. So why don't they seem to like each other?
@KierDoyle
takes a look at why some seemingly very good players' G+ may be lower than we'd expect.
Just for fun: Here's our Goals Added (g+) metric playing out over an entire match between the Seattle Sounders and the New England Revolution. The match ended 3-3.
Sobering San Jose stat that came up during research:
It has been 304 days since the San Jose Earthquakes have won an MLS match against a team that wasn't Minnesota United FC. (2-1 over Portland 9/30/17)
Sneak preview of the updated tiers of MLS teams organized by their commitment to and staffing of data & analytics teams. Article from
@etmckinley
drops tomorrow morning.
For the first time in the sordid history of our organization, we were granted a media vote for the 2023
#MLSAllStar
game. This is the team we submitted, made up of the g+ leaders at each position, which is unimpeachable. Let us know how much you agree in the replies below.
#MLS
#USMNT
twitter was in fine form this weekend. We made a computer read all the worst tweets and then create its own. Presenting:
#BOTHALTEROUT
by
@etmckinley
Throw-ins happen so frequently in games, and yet they mostly go unnoticed or considered.
@etmckinley
takes a deep dive into our data and finds some interesting things about the game's most common set-piece.
Game by game xG should be taken with many grains of salt, but Portland exceeding their xG on Saturday by 4.1 goals is the biggest single-game overperformance of xG in our dataset (back to 2013).
It's the time of the year that literally DOZENS of people have been waiting for!
The 2021 MLS Goals Added Team of the Season!!!
Go forth and extol the virtues of goals added if your favorite players are included, or dunk upon it in quote tweet form if they were snubbed!
Goals added is part of a broad shift in soccer analytics toward more advanced possession-based metrics. How does it compare to similar models like VAEP and PV+?
@KierDoyle
breaks it down.
We don't get that many scandals in MLS, so when we saw some people alleging voter fraud for Goals of the Week, we put our best detective,
@etmckinley
on the case.
Excited to announce that we are now American Soccer United FC. We're ecstatic to be the first blog to make specifically USA-centered content "global" by making our name even more forgettable. Below is our new logo. Let us know how much you love it by using the hashtag
#soccer
!
With the introduction of Goals Added, we also needed a clean, intuitive way to share these concepts.
@etmckinley
shares his design process for these gorgeous visualizations.
Berhalter on Matt Turner in the ongoing USMNT Gold Cup roster media call: "You know, these guys at MLSsoccer writing article after article about how good he is, the best shot stopper in the history of the league and stuff, but it to a certain extent I agree with them"
Everyone in sports need the help of nerds. American Soccer nerds
@AnalysisEvolved
do a fantastic job with their content and I'm not sure I've done my job publicly to recognize that. Keep doing you!!!
#MLS
#USL
#USSF
Five years ago TODAY, America watched Wondo send their World Cup hopes skying over the bar against Belgium, and US soccer fans simply will not him forget it.
@JmooreQuakes
takes an in-depth look at that moment in US Soccer history with hindsight and data.
Who were the best players in MLS last season according to Goals Added? If you're curious about Goals Added check out this introduction and keep an eye here this week as we dive deeper into how this metric works.
Part two of our series on Where Goals Come From is here!
@C_Carpenter14
and
@JmooreQuakes
take a look at the most valuable types of progressive passes.
Decision Day is nearly here!
@MattyAnselmo
simulated MLS playoff outcome probabilities based on the new playoff format & the strength of teams, as measured by both team-level metrics and player-level metrics according to the best combined lineup of each team's last two games.
The big news that is not getting enough attention after last night's games:
@jalil_anibaba4
is no longer the best GK in MLS history on a per-minute basis. There's a new king in the house:
@Alex_Roldan8
.
Really excited to announce some things that have been in the works for many months, and crunched to get done before kickoff today.
Check out our newly redesigned interactive tables, which now include goals added (g+) and
#NWSL
data!
What makes a passer good? Can "g+ boost" help us quantify the value of less aggressive passers?
@johnspacemuller
takes a look at passes, press resistance, and of course, Darlington Nagbe.
Our guy
@thedummyrun
made some cool bar graphs for MLS players, and we figured we'd post some. Let us know if there's anybody you'd like to see. I get to pick first and so I'm choosing Eduard Atuesta who is just otherworldy so far this season.
Sadly, Om was found deceased today. Our thoughts and prayers are with his friends and family. Preliminarily, no foul play is suspected. Detectives continue to investigate. Thank you for sharing.
What is DAVIES?
Short Answer: DAVIES utilizes data, accessible to anyone around the world, to estimate a player's total Goals Added for any given season while accounting for their age and style of play.
Long Answer:
From
@SamGoldberg1882
&
@mimburgio
These two players stand the most out from their peers in their respective leagues. Your Goals Added (g+) leaders* for NWSL and MLS are:
NWSL: Sophia Smith - +0.40 (!!!!)
MLS: Hany Mukhtar - +0.18
*per 96 mins, minimum 1000 mins, as compared to average player at their position.
The creation of g+ has spawned two related metrics, g- and g+ boost, to answer questions that g+ itself doesn’t.
@mimburgio
combines these metrics to see if a more holistic system can provide a better picture of value on and off the ball.
The two best seasons for g+ per 96min in our dataset are Sophia Smith in 2022 and Sophia Smith in 2023. Is it possible that everyone agrees she's probably the best player on the
#USWNT
and also still isn't being talked about enough? Kinda feels like it.
San Diego must have seen our article yesterday. We've bumped them up to the top tier based on this announcement. We also added a few other staff that we learned about after publication.
San Diego FC officially have their first chief soccer officer: Tyler Heaps.
Heaps has been with Right to Dream and helping lead SDFC's inaugural build out. Now, he's officially CSO.
He was previously with AS Monaco and US Soccer before Right to Dream.
ASA has been using and adjusting Goals Added (g+) since we unveiled it a couple years ago. Now the time has come: say hello to Goals Subtracted (g-).
By
@MattyAnselmo
Weekend reads on the new Goals Added:
Intro
Methodology
Other models
Visualizations
Next week we'll pit g+ vs. video, try to break the model, and talk new projects. Stay tuned!
It's no secret that LAFC are good, but how are they THIS good and is there any way that MLS teams can hope to stop them?
@Tacticsplatform
takes a deep dive into what makes MLS' best team tick and offers some pointers to teams who have to play them.
If you're at all interested in that little soccer club in Atlanta, have we got an in-depth preview for you.
@TiotalFootball
breaks down a busy and confusing offseason and looks forward to 2020.
We just made the biggest data and infrastructure update in ASA history!
Our interactive tables now have NWSL data back to 2015, & goals added (g+) values for all seasons of NWSL and MLS data. This is huge. h/t
@TylerRichardett
@MattyAnselmo
It's the dawn of something new at ASA - a set of articles and tools designed separately and specifically for coaches, team execs, and analysts. Read part one by
@JmooreQuakes
and
@C_Carpenter14
here:
We spend a lot of time discussing analytics, but what does a performance analyst actually do on a day to day basis?
@C_Carpenter14
, a performance analyst for the University of Virginia men's soccer team, shares what a typical day at work looks like.
Five years ago TODAY, America watched Wondo send their World Cup hopes skying over the bar against Belgium, and US soccer fans simply will not him forget it.
@JmooreQuakes
takes an in-depth look at that moment in US Soccer history with hindsight and data.
The
#NWSL
Challenge Cup kicks off next week!
@CarlonCarpenter
kicks off our 2022 NWSL coverage with a tactical guide to what went down in 2021 and which trends are likely to have the biggest impact this season.
How can Goals Added (g+) help assign a dollar value to MLS players?
@SeanSteffen
takes a look at how the complexities of MLS roster-building work, and whether teams can use g+ to help with these challenges.
We're delighted to have a special guest on the podcast this week. A huge thank you to
@NewYorkRedBulls
midfielder
@seanakiradavis
who joined us to discuss soccer analytics from a players perspective.