Originally conducted during the 2024 season and only slightly interrupted by Hurricane Helene, these insights provide a valuable snapshot of how analytics have been evolving in the NWSL
Over the last several years, the team here at American Soccer Analysis has been assessing the State of MLS Analytics by combing through team websites, scouring LinkedIn, and asking those who would know about how many people each team employs. This year, we’ve taken our talents to the women’s game to determine the Tiers of NWSL Analytics.
Read MoreEvery year, we update the State of MLS Analytics by putting teams into tiers based upon how many analytics staff they have. However, the number of analytics staff members doesn’t necessarily say anything about the quality of work that a club is producing or if analytics is being incorporated into team decision making. And unfortunately we can never really know what is going on inside a club’s analytics department. For the third straight year, we decided to do the best we could to get behind the scenes and asked club analytics staff for their input.
Read MoreTen years ago, if an MLS club had one person “doing analytics” it was a big deal. Now a majority of clubs now have multiple full time employees in actual analytics departments and a team is seen as backwards if it don’t have at least one staff member primarily focused on game analytics. Every year, we comb team websites, LinkedIn, and ask those who would know about how many people each team employs to determine The Tiers of MLS Analytics.
Read MoreBy Paul Harvey, Mike Imburgio, Ben Bellman
Since it was introduced, Goals Added has been superior to most of the publicly available algorithmic rating systems, such as those provided by WhoScored, SofaScore, or Fotmob. The additional context of just how much each action is contributing to the likelihood of scoring provides more information than simply evaluating a player based on the number of certain actions (the value of those actions also weighted by a human being, introducing bias). Similarly, basing scoring on a known currency of goals is simply much more intuitive than some nebulous 0-10 rating scale.
Read MoreWhen Goals Added first entered the public sphere, it marked a major shift in how soccer could be interpreted using data. Although similar models had been developed, it was hard to get data and turn that data into insights. In terms of a unit of account, there are few expected value models as accessible and understandable as g+.
Despite the initial success, though, g+ is still an opaque measure in many ways. Much like it’s spiritual father figure, WAR, you lose some of the how of a player's game. Although on the broad level the numbers are clear, even a simple comparison between two players can be hard to do just with the six Goals Added categories. Sure, we can say that one player has added more value via passing than another one. But what kind of passes led to that value? What’s the actual on field difference between the two players?
Read MoreBy Chloe Sainsbury, Catalina Bush, and Jamon Moore
We did Where Goals Come From for MLS, and we’ve reached the roughly one third mark of the NWSL season where we can actually have some takes! Enjoy.
Read MoreIf Where Goals Come From is new to you or you want a quick refresher of the key concepts, we put a quick overview into the Eastern Conference article.
…and that’s enough of an introduction for today. Let’s talk about the teams!
Read MoreDuring the pandemic, when Carlon Carpenter and I researched the impact of certain types of soccer passes, we were blown away by how important they were to goal scoring. We wrote 10 articles about them throughout 2021, called the “Where Goals Come From” series. There was so much material, we could have written 25 articles -- many ideas have never emerged and hopefully will still come out at some point (or we’ll work with clubs to implement as their own competitive advantage). Even from those 10 articles, we never imagined the reach they would have in clubs across the world.
Now feels like the right time to bring this back and examine further how the concepts introduced in these articles impact the sport, particularly in an unpredictable league like Major League Soccer. I’m grateful fellow ASA analysts Catalina Bush and Arman Kafai have joined me for this phase of the journey.
Here’s a quick primer / refresher on the Where Goals Come From concepts:
-Jamon
Read MoreHello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. You can read all of them here! We got a preview of this exact match up already, with the Spirit defeating Orlando in a penalty shootout in the Challenge Cup Final.
If you want some extended audio preview content, check out the xOwn Goals Podcast (available wherever you get your pods).
And if you want to support the best women’s stats content on the internet, consider checking out the ASA Patreon. There’s a patron discord, and all sorts of cool tools you can use to analyze the soccer.
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