How Do Teams Expansion Draft?

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Now that the soccer portion of the Major League Soccer season is over we can focus on what really matters: complicated systems by which the league shuttles players from one city to another. Though the 48-hour trade window came and went with little excitement, we’ll get a better look into what St. Louis CITY SC will look like on the field when it kicks off in 2023


The expansion draft doesn’t play as big of a role in team building as it once did but there’s absolutely still value to be found. Just finding average (or slightly below average) contributors can be a boon for franchises in early seasons in the league. As Lutz Pfannenstiel looks to build his Designated Team, he’ll have an opportunity to find contributors already in MLS. So how have the recent teams done in this particular team building exercise?

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Ian Watches Soccer with a Computer - The Computer's Favorite Plays of the Season

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Ian Watches Soccer with a Computer - The Computer's Favorite Plays of the Season

Now that the regular season is by all credible accounts over, it seems like a great time to peer back through the annals of history and see which plays the computer liked the best from the ENTIRE SEASON. Let us comb through literal months of historical footage dating back to like May, and remember some of the campaign’s most pedestrian moments that a computer thinks are the most impactful plays of the regular season.

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2022 NWSL Regular Season Best XI: G+ edition

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2022 NWSL Regular Season Best XI: G+ edition

Another year has come around and it’s time for everyone’s favorite discourse: end of season awards. We’re tired of all the lists that leave out the players who really deserve their dues, so we crunched the numbers and returned the top 11 players according to American Soccer Analysis’ Goals Added (g+). This is totally unbiased and not at all subject to some tweaking to ensure that the output made sense (yes, there are two primarily left backs on our backline – in Vlatko we trust).

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Ian Watches Soccer With a Computer - Decision Day

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The decisions have been made. Or occurred. Things have been decided, but in the boxing sense, I guess. I’ve never really liked #decisionday as a moniker for the craziest day in Major League Soccer. First of all, Decision Day is already a thing in another sport, and in THAT sport people are, you know, actually making decisions so it works better. Here are some alternate suggestions for what to call this most exciting day:

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Ian Watches Soccer with a Computer - A Weekly Goals Added Roundup

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Ian Watches Soccer with a Computer - A Weekly Goals Added Roundup

Soccer, when viewed through a lens pulled back wide enough is basically an exercise in futility. There are so many ways that players are prevented from accomplishing their most basic directive of kicking the ball over that goal line. Some of these are personal failings. Some are systemic. Some are manufactured. Some, of course, are just your no frills varietal of lousy luck.

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MLS 2022 Playoff Projections - The West

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MLS 2022 Playoff Projections - The West

When the season started this year, there were a lot of questions floating around the Western conference. Will LAFC make it back into the playoffs. Will Nashville take the next step and be a shield contender? Can anyone stop Seattle?

In hindsight, these questions are quite silly, considering how these storylines played out, but that’s the type of thing only hindsight can bring. In reality, making predictions about MLS, especially before a game is even played, is very difficult. Heck, even with the right data, making predictions in MLS is hard.

There is also the matter of humans being bad at interpreting probability in general. Below are the playoff odds for the Western Conference going into decision day, and, as you can see, we have seen some major changes in probabilities.

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Ian Watches Soccer With a Computer - A Weekly G+ Roundup

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American Soccer Analysis introduced the metric g+ (goals added) back in May of 2020. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that it has changed the very way people think about and discuss soccer. Ok, that’s a bit of an overstatement, but it’s NOT an overstatement to say that in the two ensuing years, people have definitely looked at the g+ tables and gone “Maynor Figueroa? REALLY?”

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MLS 2022 Playoff Projections

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MLS 2022 Playoff Projections

The MLS playoff season is fast approaching, and with 2-3 games left to go (depending on the team), we are now into the part of the season where the question of who is going make the playoffs is a desperate one for teams on the bubble. In the interest of fueling the existential dread of these fanbases, and, in keeping with the ASA tradition of releasing our playoff model projections whenever we get to them, we remembered that we should probably release those. So, without further ado, as I know half the readers will be gamblers wanting the good stuff up front, here are those projections.

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