By Kieran Doyle

MLS is back on Thursday, as we return from the World Cup break into a season finely poised to be one of the most fun we’ve had in quite some time. At the same time, our friends John Muller and Mike Imburgio have launched their new app, Futi. I’m sure they agonized over every word of their tagline, so I’ll copy it here: 

The new app that makes football make sense. Follow your favorite teams and players with real-time scores, shareable data visuals and pro analytics made simple.

 While ideologically we believe it’s called soccer, the app definitely does what it says on the tin. As such, I thought it’d be fun to dig in and see what Futi tells me to keep an eye on as we welcome MLS Saturday night’s back into our hearts. If you like what you see here (every image in here will be right out of the iOS app), head to futi.live and check it out for yourself.

By Theresa Pham

Expected Threat (xT) is a model that estimates the value of a pass or carry based on its likelihood of leading to a shot and the danger associated with that shot. Unlike Karun Singh’s original xT framework, which relies entirely on historical transition probabilities, this version incorporates a logistic expected goals (xG) component to better capture shot quality. This analysis is inspired by similar work conducted by Chloe Sainsbury in 2025.

Towards a manual for the most common restart

By Ben Bellman

Whether you love long attacking throw-ins or hate them, there is no denying that they’ve become both a key feature and flashpoint in men’s soccer in the past year. John Muller likely sparked a renaissance of the tactic (and a soon-to-be Arsenal title) with his 2023 article for The Athletic, and Joe Lowery and I borrowed his method for Backheeled when Minnesota United started longthrowmaxxing in 2025 (Editor’s note: Minnesota work with Mike Imburgio through ASA’s firewalled consulting arm). But while each game has about 40 throw-ins on average, only about 10 of those throws happen close enough to reach the box. But apart from Formerly Called Twitter jokes about consultant Thomas Grønnemark, there hasn’t been much commentary about all the other ones in popular media or public analytics circles. The only exceptions I’m aware of are Eliot McKinley’s 2018 two-part opus on this very website, and some recent academic work on the top 5 European leagues that, if you like in-text citations and interpreting regressions, is an excellent spoiler for the rest of this article.