An Early Look at The 2019 USWNT World Cup Roster

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We’ve got the three stars. We’ve had ourselves a ticker tape parade. And while I don’t think the celebration should end anytime soon, it’s been long enough since the final whistle blew in Vancouver to start thinking about the future of the USWNT.

Using logistic regression on data from all previous WWCs and factoring in position, age, and whether or not the player started the final competitive match in the previous World Cup*, I constructed a model that produces a very rough probability that a player that made the 2015 roster will make the cut for France 2019. Obviously, four years is a long time and a lot can change, so these probabilities are hardly precise and should be taken with a large grain of salt. I have not included goalkeepers, as the very small sample size makes things difficult to predict, and have also left out players that we already know will not play in 2019. Furthermore, I have included forwards but the sample size is also very small, making the probabilities even less precise than that of defenders and midfielders. So at the risk of getting way ahead of ourselves, here are the very rough probabilities that the members of the current squad will be back to defend the Cup in France:

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Does travel distance affect results in MLS?

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By Brendan Kent (@brendankent)

A key feature of Major League Soccer that differentiates it from European leagues is the physical distance between the teams. While the two-conference system reduces the average distance an away team travels for a match (teams play in-conference opponents three times per year and out-of-conference opponents once), MLS teams still spend some weeks traversing several time zones.

Back of the napkin rendering of MLS stadium locations. Obviously not perfectly to scale, but you get the drift: Western Conference teams travel farther.

Back of the napkin rendering of MLS stadium locations. Obviously not perfectly to scale, but you get the drift: Western Conference teams travel farther.

In the 2013/2014 MLS Season teams traveled an average of 1,058 miles to away matches‒by this I mean the distance between the two teams’ stadiums. Houston traveled the furthest on average, at 1,345 miles per away match. The average distance traveled to away matches by each team in the 2013/2014 season is shown below. Unsurprisingly, Western Conference teams tend to travel further.

This raises the question, does travel distance effect results? In other words, can we expect teams to perform better away from home when that away match is closer to home?

In answering this question, I used multivariate regression with data from the 2013/2014 MLS regular season. Away results were used as the dependent variable to control for the significant influence of general home advantage. To control for the relative strength of the two teams, I used end of season point differential with a minor adjustment: I removed the result of the game in question to prevent any bias. I also removed any matches between LA Galaxy and Chivas USA from the data because one team was technically playing an ‘away’ game at their home stadium when they went head-to-head.

I ran several variations of the regression, all of which used away results as the dependent variable and the adjusted point differential as one of the independent variables. First, I added distance between the two teams’ stadiums as a second independent variable. This proved to be insignificant, with a p-value of .31.

Next, I ran the regression replacing distance between stadiums with the difference in time zones between the stadiums. This again proved to be an insignificant variable, returning a p-value of .5.  

Finally, I replaced the time zone variable with an indicator variable for whether the teams were two or more time zones apart. Again, insignificant, this time with a p-value of .73.

This tells us that when we control for general home advantage and the relative strengths of two teams, the physical distance between two teams has no effect on results from a statistical standpoint. This is not to say that travel takes no toll on players, it probably does, but the difference between Vancouver traveling to Portland and Vancouver traveling to New York is statistically insignificant when we control for the strength of the two teams.