Introducing Goals Subtracted: Where you aren’t but you oughta be

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Introducing Goals Subtracted: Where you aren’t but you oughta be

While valuations of offensive actions in soccer are, by no means, perfect, they are still significantly more accurate and meaningful than how we evaluate defensive actions and players’ defensive contributions. In a challenge-accepted moment of weakness, we took a stab at better assigning a Goals Added (g+) equivalent for defense: g- (“g minus”). What we’re about to share will blow your mind reinforce just how hard it is to quantify the value of an individual’s defensive actions, but hopefully I can also entertain you down this rabbit hole we’ve been playing around in for more than a year.

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When and How MLS Teams use Defensive Pressure

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When and How MLS Teams use Defensive Pressure

In May, I took a look at pressing data, trying to assess where teams had shifted from last season to this one. Considering most places where MLS is played are experiencing summer weather, I figured it was time to check back in on how MLS clubs handled the heat and more than half a season of minutes on players’ legs. Part of the impetus for digging into pressing data now is to try to understand how things have changed since May.

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Europe, Money, and the Problem with Disparity

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American Soccer Analysis has been in the analytics game since 2013, and, early on in this project, we noticed something that’s always troubled us when it comes to taking the seminal analytics studies and concepts developed in Europe and applying it to an MLS data-set. To put it frankly, they don’t work as well.

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The Replication Project: Is xG The Best Predictor of Future Results?

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This is the first article of what we are terming The Replication Project where we take an important soccer analytics finding from yesteryear and see if it still holds up with modern data. While this can be just a straightforward replication, it can also lead down some rabbit holes as you will find in this first installment where we look at whether the claim that xG is the best predictor of future performance still holds up.

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What does the new Apple TV deal mean for MLS?

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What does the new Apple TV deal mean for MLS?

If you’re reading this, you’ve seen the headlines. $2.5 BILLION dollars for Major League Soccer. A relationship with APPLE. NO Blackouts!

The last domestic TV deal signed in 2015 totaled roughly $720 million, so this seems like a pretty big step up. Perhaps MLS will finally be a league of choice. It is 2022 after all.

As usual, to get at something closer to the truth we must go beneath the headlines. There are a few drivers of the headline value that need to be unwound to determine just where we might expect MLS to go from here and how this might transform the quality on the pitch.

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Gotta Catch Em All: MLS Teams as Pokemon

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Gotta Catch Em All: MLS Teams as Pokemon

Ask anybody around my age (now pretty old!) to describe their first experience playing Pokemon Red or Blue, and they can probably tell you. From Professor Oak being unsure of your gender, to the feeling when you first venture into the grass to wrangle a Rattata, those first moments of stepping into a much bigger world are seared onto our consciousnesses even decades past the game’s release.

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BOTHALTEROUT: Training an AI to hate the USMNT

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BOTHALTEROUT: Training an AI to hate the USMNT

The United States Men’s National Team Twitter community is an interesting place. While there is lots of good stuff there, like detailed tactical analysis and extensive coverage of every bounce pass, there is also a large contingent of people that seem to hate everything about soccer in this country. Win or lose, you’ll see them in the replies of many tweets from US Soccer or journalists confidently expressing why whatever just happened is bad for the current and future state of American soccer and they have the solution.

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The Most Pressing Questions in MLS

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The Most Pressing Questions in MLS

Pressing has become a bigger and bigger part of the identity of soccer globally within the last decade. MLS teams have shifted along with the global trends. Take the New York Red Bulls and Philadelphia Union: two teams with an aggressive pressing style fundamental in the clubs’ DNA and instilled from the very top of the organization. More and more MLS teams are pressing aggressively, and though not all teams are following the all-out model set by the Red Bulls and Union, pressing has become a standard element of many teams’ gameplans.

But how widespread is it really? And what are some of the key differences in strategies? Using pressure data from Football Reference and Statsbomb, I tried to make some sense of where MLS teams stand in the pressing landscape.

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