The press (whether high, counter, or other) is in vogue in MLS. MLS teams are, on average, they pressiest they’ve ever been. The Red Bulls, NYCFC, Atlanta, and New England all primarily defend in some form of press. A handful of other teams - Sporting Kansas City and LAFC most prominently - go to it on occasion. Orlando City began the season trying to play a higher pressure defense:
Read MoreIn Major League Soccer, young players don’t always get a chance to show their stuff. When they do get a chance, only a very small percentage of players under 21 actually add value to a team over more experienced options - that’s why it is such a big deal when youngsters play and make an impact in MLS. Because of the relative rarity of young players getting minutes in MLS, we are going to look at and appreciate some of the top U-21 talent that has burst onto the scene and produced this season.
Read MoreWelcome to our MLS week 24 watchability rankings. The rankings are a metric we utilize to try and identify the best games to watch for a neutral in this weekend of upcoming game. If you aren’t familiar with how we put it together, please have a gander at the original article where we explain it.
Read MoreWelcome to Setting the Table. Each week we take some time to focus on the best chance creators in MLS from the last weekend. If you want to see the best chances that were wasted check out Lowered Expectations. Here we focus on chances that ended with the ball in the back of the net.
Read MoreWelcome to Lowered Expectations, week 24 edition! Each week, we go about posting chalkboards and GIFs of the weekend’s best open-play shot attempts which did not quite live up to expectations (and rarely do we update this paragraph). We look at each one and not only evaluate the results, but also the process leading to them.
Read MoreFor many in Sports media around the world, Deadline Day is one that is circled three times on the calendar. The reason? DRAAAAAAMA. So much drama. Helicopters being deployed all over Europe, fax machine malfunctions, Harry Redknapp, players just up and showing up at rival teams training facility hoping to force a move, and of course, the heartbreak for fans and players of dream deals falling just short.
MLS does not have this. The league is too centralized. Europe has an entire industry devoted to transfer speculation and rumor mongering that gets fans into an agitated fugue state. That industry is not as well established here in Major League Soccer. Teams tend to be pretty leaky and so there are very few transactions that come as a real surprise. There is a lot of irony on Twitter about various odd situations that demonstrate how “soccer has finally made it here”, but until we get our own Harry Redknapp getting blockaded in his car by reporters on the way home from practice, we’re still just playing dress up.
Read MoreExpected goals (xG) has finally made it, the Times of London are including an alternate table for the English Premier League based upon per game xG for this season. While using only which team had the highest xG in a game for determining a winner is problematic, it is still a step in the right analytical direction.
Read MoreNicolas Lodeiro doing Nicolas Lodeiro things
Nico Lodeiro is a Touch Percentage Superstar. His 14.4 percent leads MLS players with a significant sample size this season, and he was similarly among the league leaders in 2016 and 2017. Most of his competitors are deeper-lying midfielders who are more likely to get on the ball in safer positions, whereas Lodeiro’s touches are situated primarily in a more congested attacking third.
Lodeiro is everything for this Sounders team, the fulcrum through which they pass and create. As John Strong and Brian Dunseth relayed on the FS1 broadcast on Sunday, Garth Lagerwey and the higher-ups consider Seattle Lodeiro’s team. Only a player with the on-ball proficiency and volume of Lodeiro could deserve that lofty mantle.
Few players in MLS’ recent history have possessed Lodeiro’s willingness to control a game’s shape, and almost no one has been able to do so from the advanced positions that he has. The Uruguayan is everywhere, by design. He’s constantly moving and trying to make himself available for passes. That, his never-ending movement and incisive mobility, is what stood out in 2016 when he arrived midseason and dominated everyone.
Read MoreAs part of the US Soccer hackathon in Chicago last month, our team of Benjamin Harrison, Kevin Minkus, Eliot McKinley, Andrew Crago, and I developed a player decision model to evaluate final third decision making (Editor's note: Andrew is being humble and left out one important point: THEY WON THE HACKATHON. Here's a link to the project). The model uses Gaussian process classification to estimate the decision a player would make—either to pass, shoot, or attempt to take on a defender—at a specific point in the final third. Combining the players on the same team, we can extend this model to estimate the decisions the team as a whole makes in the attacking third. Then, to further understand team decision making in different game situations, the data is stratified into three categories to look at the adjustments in play when behind, tied, or ahead.
There’s not a whole lot that jumps out in an initial glance at the plots—there are no clear similarities between teams at the top or bottom of the league. There is, however, one specific team that stands out. Atlanta is extremely consistent—their attacking strategy is virtually identical regardless of the score. In the often volatile arena of professional sports consistency usually correlates with success, and Atlanta’s 2018 campaign is no exception. But ultimately it’s hard to say whether this consistency is a source or byproduct of their successes this year. Winning tends to alleviate a lot of the pressure on a team, which presumably would lead to more consistent performances, or it’s entirely possible that Atlanta is simply executing well.
Read MoreBill Hamid is returning to MLS and the reception has been largely positive, which is… odd. Sure, it’s nice that he’ll be getting consistent field time again, but there are some hard truths that are being glossed over in favor of a positive story. While the level of zeal towards an American’s return to MLS is nice (“Well maybe he learned a lot while sitting on the bench for a year and is now actually better!”) we would do well to admit the negatives that have come along with the situation. Grab a comforting hand because we’re going to take off those rose colored glasses and see what lessons there are to learn from all of this.
1. Hamid’s time in Europe has been an unmitigated failure - There’s this perception that a player going to Europe will automatically be handed a bottle of Michael Jordan’s Secret Stuff. Unfortunately Hamid’s experience was far from what people hoped and the last year was anything but a positive step in his career. In the last twelve months, Hamid played as many times for the United States as he did for FC Midtjylland. (FC Midtjylland is typically known for playing many more games than the United States in a calendar year.) In his time with Midtjylland, he played three times with the first team, conceding seven goals in the games. The whole point of going to Europe was to elevate his game and yet he’s sat the bench time-and-time again. Hamid even struggled to get games with the reserve team, where nineteen year old Oliver Ottesen received twice as many games as him.
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