What the Numbers Tell Us About the Rapids in 2020

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What the Numbers Tell Us About the Rapids in 2020

New numbers are supposed to reveal new understandings of teams and players - to find a better way to quantify the things we see on the field into useful, descriptive data that truly reflects a player’s genuine contribution to a team’s performance.

You’re at this website probably because you distrust the traditional numbers that a television broadcast might use to describe a player’s performance. ‘Assists’ are valuable, but less so if a player is a tremendous passer with lousy finishers on the end of his passes. ‘Pass completion percentage’ isn’t particularly valuable if a player makes lots of safe lateral and backwards passes.

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Goals Added (g+) MLS Analysis: Age Impact

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Goals Added (g+) MLS Analysis: Age Impact

American Soccer Analysis (ASA) has built an expected possession value metric called goals added (g+). You can see a more in-depth explanation of this model here . The g+ model measures every action and how it impacts their team’s chance of scoring and conceding across the next two possessions. Compared to looking at traditional stats (goals, assists, tackles, etc.), g+ is more representative of a players’ true impact on their team’s results over the course of a season.

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The State of MLS Analytics

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The State of MLS Analytics

A couple weeks back, I tweeted a list of MLS teams that employed someone on staff focused on analytics. Unexpectedly, the tweet got a lot of feedback, mostly people urging their favorite team to hire someone, some saying that their club had one that I didn’t include (hello, RBNY twitter), and some critical feedback or concerns. This is great! People caring about analytics in soccer is an unquestioned good from my perspective. However, I did want to be a bit more nuanced about what I mean by analytics and what staff may be considered primarily focused on analytics.

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Which Goalkeepers Won the Challenge Cup (and What They Still Have to Work On)

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Which Goalkeepers Won the Challenge Cup (and What They Still Have to Work On)

The NWSL Challenge Cup looked to be set on a predictable path when the knockout stage started but some penalty heroics and general top-notch goalkeeping gave way for the top seeds booking early travel plans back home. But which goalkeeper stood on their head to keep their team’s tournament hopes alive? And what questions do they need to answer going forward? And how many rhetorical questions can we fit in this post? Keep reading to find out!

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Defining Roles: How Every Player Contributes to Goals

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Defining Roles: How Every Player Contributes to Goals

Formations are a lie, for the most part. We all know this by now; learning a team’s formation generally tells you very little about how they play. One reason for this is that positions are also a lie. Nani and Diego Rossi are both wingers on paper, but anyone who watches the two knows that they play very differently. We’ve made more specific terms, like inverted winger, to help describe the difference. But what if you hadn’t seen a player play yet? What if you’d like some objective way to define a player’s role beyond just their position? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a data-driven way of determining a playstyle that we could use to give us an idea of how a winger...wings?

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Determining the Best Lineup Formation for Controlling the Field

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Determining the Best Lineup Formation for Controlling the Field

From video games, to board games, to athletic competitions, having a well thought out strategy is vital to winning a game. In soccer, a major part of this pre-game strategy is deciding upon the formation, shape, and structure for a team to play. A variety of different factors would persuade a coach to structure their team into different offensive and defensive structures on a game to game basis. Some of these factors include, but are certainly not limited to: strength of squad, opposition strengths, squad availability, perceived space available, and more. Moreover, formations often are fluid and can change at half time or during the game based on a coaches instruction.

This article will analyze certain formations and shapes that are more spatially beneficial to offensive teams than defensive teams, and vice versa, and will be validated through both original metrics and metrics already used within the field.

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An Ode to Christian Pulisic

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An Ode to Christian Pulisic

We are now well and truly back with the return of English football and to everyone’s shock and horror, Christian Pulisic is still really good! Since the return of the EPL hee bagged the equalizer against Aston Villa with a hard back post run and a more-difficult-than-it-looked half volley into the roof of the goal, then scored one of the most hilariously pacey solo goals I’ve ever seen to open the scoring against Manchester City. Soon after, without scoring, he lifted Chelsea out of one of the worst halves of their season against Leicester with dynamic pressing and outrageously direct transition dribbling. He followed up those performances with assists against West Ham, Watford and Norwich, and a really impressive weak footed finish against Crystal Palace. Like I said, he’s really good.

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What Each Goalkeeper Needs to do to Advance in the Challenge Cup

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What Each Goalkeeper Needs to do to Advance in the Challenge Cup

Win or go home! After four games each participating NWSL team (RIP Orlando Pride) faces off in a do or die situation. With the group stage done, now it’s time to look ahead to what each goalkeeper needs to do to push their team into the semifinals of the NWSL Challenge Cup.

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MLS Is Back: Week One Highs And Lows

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MLS Is Back: Week One Highs And Lows

My excellent colleagues at ASA have done some terrific work in rolling out Goals Added (g+) the past couple months, putting out methodology articles, and finding new and creative ways to assess player performance on the pitch through this metric. We highly recommend you read the articles linked above, but g+ is the model we built to assign value to every single on-ball action that happens in a soccer game. The return of MLS has given us at ASA the first extended period of which to use this g+ data since the league’s restart, so through the medium of video analysis I will be looking at some of the major actions of g+ during the first week of action. I’ll be giving context to the numbers behind it: where the players did well, where they did poorly, and why g+ afforded them the values they were given!

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