Breaking Goals Added

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Breaking Goals Added

As you may have noticed with this week’s rollout of goals added (g+) and the related articles, we at ASA are pretty fired up about our new possession xG framework and player valuation methodology. The journey to get to this point would best be documented by the thousands of messages in the ASA slack chat over the last 9 months, and something I want to highlight is that the exercise of putting together this model would have been worth it in and of itself for all involved even if nothing was ever published.

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Goals Added: How a Computer Watches Nicolas Lodeiro Play Soccer

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Goals Added: How a Computer Watches Nicolas Lodeiro Play Soccer

There’s an old xkcd where a guy standing on top of a giant trash heap of math symbols explains how machine learning works: you dump your data into this junk pile here, see, and answers fall out the other end. And if the answers are wrong? “Just stir the pile until they start looking right,” he shrugs.

Models like goals added (g+) are great at answering wildly complex questions like “How much did this left back’s whiffed tackle at the halfway line change his team’s mathematical probability of scoring next time it gets the ball?” but terrible at telling you how they did it. In that sense the model is sort of like the athletes it’s trained on, guys who get a face full of microphones after every game but, as David Foster Wallace once wrote, “usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just these qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination.” What were you thinking when you derived that bizarre possession value? Well, Sebi, it’s not the result we wanted but we’re just trying to take it one calculation at a time. Thanks to the fans for believing in us.

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Goals Added: The Art of the Wheel

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Goals Added: The Art of the Wheel

Look at that. Pretty, right? The colors. The font. The icons. The logo. That tiny beeswarm. All work together to make a pretty damn good visualization. But these things just don’t emerge from a computer fully formed, they take a lot of effort and there are a ton of ways that things can go wrong. Inspired by Peter McKeever’s discussion of his beautiful diamond plots, here are the decisions we made and iterations of this viz along the way to what you see above.

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Goals Added and The Great Possession Shift

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Goals Added and The Great Possession Shift

Since data analytics tools first began to be applied to soccer, the field has moved in waves. In the beginning, there was a focus on goals. Then attention shifted to look at other things we can count, like shots, passes, tackles, and all the other events we know and love. Eventually, there was a coalescing around possession percentages, pass completion, and other second-order statistics. From there, everyone went all-in on shots. Shots give us goals, and goals are so rare that it’s difficult enough to learn much from them alone, that looking at shots makes sense.

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Goals Added: Deep Dive Methodology

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Ever since we founded American Soccer Analysis in 2013, I’ve hoped to construct a metric that credits players for actions all over the field, not just for goals and assists. I’ve always wanted something that could be used to ascribe values to players in a currency all soccer fans could understand. In the pre-ASA era, I got my fix analyzing baseball statistics, where analysts are spoiled by tons of publicly available data and a sport that, by rule, creates distinct plays largely independent of all other plays.

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Goals Added: Introducing A New Way To Measure Soccer

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Goals Added: Introducing A New Way To Measure Soccer

Soccer analytics has always had a problem between the boxes. Thanks to expected goals, we’ve gotten good at valuing shots, but shots won’t tell you much about the ninety-plus-minute scramble that produces just 26 total chances over the course of your average MLS game and maybe three goals if you’re lucky. Shots make up about three seconds of action for every four minutes of soccer. Grading the sport on that alone is like assigning GPA based on how well students walk across the graduation stage.

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"We're Not Supposed to be Here": Nick Rimando's Legacy in MLS

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"We're Not Supposed to be Here": Nick Rimando's Legacy in MLS

Nick Rimando stands on his line. Actually, standing isn’t the right word to describe what goalkeepers do before a penalty. They wiggle, shimmy, stare down the penalty kick taker. In this case: David Beckham, bleached blond and bemused. This little American couldn’t lace up my boots. He doesn’t deserve a chance to stop me, David Beckham. Surprisingly, Rimando has a similar thought. “‘We’re not supposed to be here’,” he would recount his thought process to MLSsoccer a few years later. “Everyone in this crowd, everyone who follows this league doesn’t think that we should be here, doesn’t think that we should win this game. This is the Galaxy’s game.”

Beckham steps up. Rimando shuffles to his left, half-diving, half falling down. Fully realizing his mistake. The dive is uncertain; he looks like someone who realizes their phone is still in their pocket the instant before they crash into the deep end of a pool. The shot rolls into the net without trouble.

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NWSL 2020 Mini-Previews: North Carolina, Sky Blue, and Chicago

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The eighth season of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) was supposed to kick off on April 18th. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the beginning of the season has been postponed until shrugs, well…eventually… someday… we hope. We’re hard at work creating full season previews, but while we wait for games to start up, we wanted to give fellow woso fans a little something to read. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some of what we’re thinking about in hopes of starting conversations about the upcoming season now. Think of these as the previews of our previews.

Our first set of teams are all in very different places coming into this season. One hopes to continue dominance. Another’s offseason changes potentially signal a new chapter for the club. The third must find a way to cope with the glaring departure of arguably their most important player.

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Coaches Reward Goalscorers. But Should They?

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Coaches Reward Goalscorers. But Should They?

On March 30, 2019, the 16-year-old midfielder Gianluca Busio came on for Sporting Kansas City in a rout of Montreal. He didn’t do a whole lot in his half hour on the pitch—seven of his eight completed passes went backwards—but in the 78th minute he poked the ball away from a center back and slotted home his team’s sixth goal. The next week Busio was rewarded with a full 90 minutes and he scored again. The week after that, another appearance, a third straight goal. Coach Peter Vermes was sticking with the red-hot kid and it was paying off.

Alas, not all breakthroughs go as smoothly as Busio’s. On July 17, a teenage striker named Theo Bair earned his second career start for Vancouver. He made a couple of promising runs where he held off a New England defender and found a shot from a low cross, but neither chance connected. The first hit the far post and ricocheted out. Two minutes later, Bair reached back for a bouncing pass at the top of the six-yard box but couldn’t quite corral it. The shot sailed over the crossbar from embarrassingly close range and Bair tumbled head over heels into the goal, where he slapped the grass in frustration. He was subbed off, and next game he only appeared for the last 14 minutes.

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Data Based Coaching: How to incorporate data-driven decisions into your coaching workflow

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Data Based Coaching: How to incorporate data-driven decisions into your coaching workflow

I will start this with a disclaimer: this is not how Borussia Dortmund or Manchester United incorporate analytics into their coaching workflow, it’s not even how the Colorado Rapids incorporate data into their coaching. It is a look at the opposite side of the same coin Carl Carpenter examined earlier this week, only for a smaller school without access to the biggest and baddest equipment.

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