How Away Teams Win in MLS (and how to be like them)
/By Jamon Moore
Short answer? They don't win. Or at least not enough. This has been discussed ad nauseum on the interwebs for a while, but the MLS home field advantage is the strongest of any of the five major professional sports in the US.
Not only that, it is considered one of the strongest home field advantages in professional soccer. Here’s the win percentage for home and away teams in the top European leagues plus MLS:
Where this gets tricky is how 2020 should be viewed. In most leagues, such as the English Premier League and the French Ligue 1, home-field advantage seems completely offset by the lack of crowds last year. The Bundesliga had an interesting 2019 where there was little difference between home and away performance, so outliers exist.
More importantly for us, MLS away teams fell back to a 25% win percentage in 2021. That tells us in a one-season sample size that shorter, mostly in-conference travel, along with charter flights, doesn’t seem to boost away teams’ chances of winning. In fact, it just seems to create more draws overall.
Here’s the same chart but with only North American leagues and Argentina.
With the exception of the NWSL, which didn’t play a real season, each of these leagues had a lessening of the home field advantage in 2020. In Argentina, home and away actually flipped spots.
To boil this down to a simple table, we can look at it this way:
| Home Win | Away Win | Draw | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 51% | 24% | 25% | |
| 44% | 31% | 25% | |
| 45% | 29% | 26% |
No matter how you look at it, home field advantage in Major League Soccer is huge, teams are still struggling to get results on the road, and it doesn’t feel like charter flights are the solution to the problem (although they should still do them). Before Covid, the ASA team discussed all the reasons that this advantage may be as strong as it is without coming to any conclusions.
What this article is not about: the definitive answers to the question (although fans in attendance seem to have a very tangible effect on most leagues).
What this article is about: what the 25% of winners do differently to get results on the road.
The Playoffs
The MLS Cup Playoffs are in full-swing. In the first six games, we had five home winners. Two of those six games went to extra time to be decided, so, in effect, we started out with away teams having a record of 1 shootout win, 4 losses, and 1 overtime loss for the away teams. Not great.
Then the probability gods took the night off when RSL beat Seattle with no shots and then a shootout. RSL then won again in Kansas City to boost the fortunes of playoff away teams further, and Portland won in Colorado continuing a recent trend of away teams beating home teams that had bye weeks more often than not. NYCFC just beat a New England Revolution team in a shootout that hadn’t played in three-plus weeks.
But to fairly compare the playoffs with the regular season, we’re going to call any game that goes to a shootout a “draw”. That puts the away teams at two wins, five losses and three draws in 2021 so far.
In fact, despite the playoff format moving to a single-elimination format in 2019, starting from 2015 (the start of the TAM Era), you have some very interesting playoff result splits:
| Games | Home Win | Away Win | Draw / Penalties | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 68 | 61% | 24% | 15% | |
| 40 | 60% | 25% | 15% | |
| 108 | 60% | 24% | 16% |
Goals and Goal Difference: A winning combination
So whether you are in the playoffs or the regular season, you are playing with a 24% chance of winning on the road. In fact, it’s enough to throw a lot of expected goals (xG) and expected goal differential (xGD) out the window if it doesn’t account for this huge difference. In case you haven’t noticed, teams in the league are hiring data analysts like crazy. Everyone is looking for an edge.
So, MLS clubs, I invite you to voluntarily send me a lot of money for this otherwise free advice (I have CashApp, Venmo, or whatever.): hire someone who will help you win away games, because most of you are doing it just fine at home.
So let’s look at a lot of data about how teams perform differently at home and away, shall we?
First up, goals per game.
Wait a second, that chart looks familiar…
You see it, don’t you? Yeah, you do.
Even with draw results not shown, wins and losses follow goals per game trends for both home and away teams. In some cases, it’s scary close. It’s even more of a direct match in the European Big Five leagues, showing that as leagues mature more, the trend will be closer. For the statisticians, the correlations fall between 0.7 and 0.85.
Boosting the odds
Okay, you get it, goals and the lack of them are correlated with winning and losing. Big whoop-de-do. The important question we want to answer is “what do MLS away teams that win do differently than MLS away teams that lose?”
To ascertain this, I looked at 84 factors related to MLS goals between home and away teams since 2015. Think of it as if every MLS season had only two teams named Team Home and Team Away that played each other in hundreds of games every year. This is not the first time anyone has done this approach, but I think we’ll get a new look at the data here.
I’ve spent months analyzing goals (over 25,000 of them) on this very website. So maybe away teams win their duels or are great at pressing or re-pressing or something else unrelated to goals, but I’m not looking at that. This isn’t specifically a Where Goals Come From article, so I’m not going to get into “ye must play the through ball” or anything else like that, but, yeah, that can’t hurt. You’ll see soon.
In order to know how Team Away needs to win matches, we need to focus on what they do differently when they win, we also need to contrast that with how Team Home wins matches. We already know that Team Home has more goals per game than Team Away, but let’s start by looking at how the goal differential per game is spread out.
The first thing we need to consider is that Team Home wins much more decisively by multiple goals and by 2x more games than Team Away does by two goals and about 4x to 5x more by three goals or more. So, in general, Team Away is squeaking out wins while Team Home is often dominating in wins. This can make it difficult to analyze team form while they are alternating home and away games.
Is Team Away just chronically underperforming? Let’s take a look at expected goals.
Team Home vs. Team Away: More Aggregate Expected Goals
Keep in mind the values in this visualization are based upon Winning xG differential only. Across all games, Team Home has a 1.0 expected goal differential advantage on Team Away.
Using the Where Goals Come From xG model, since 2015 Team Home has outperformed the model by about 0.05 goals per game, while Team Away has underperformed by -0.02. Season-to-season, those values can vary a bit either direction. In 2021, both Team Home and Team Away underperformed the model by -0.05 and -0.02 respectively.
In effect, Team Home “wins” on xG in games they win 69% of the time, while Team Away “wins” on xG in games they win only 44% of the time. If there was ever an argument for not trusting aggregate xG values at a game level to determine the “better team”, this is it.
Team Home vs. Team Away: More Shots and Shots on Target
What we are looking for is something that happens in a good majority of games where Team Away wins for better cause-and-effect. In the Where Goals Come From framework, some top teams are successful by outshooting their opponent by wide margins. It makes sense then to see if Team Away wins more often by shooting more shots.
The first visualization below is not very promising.
In fact, Team Away has a neutral shot differential on average, while Team Home enjoys a 4.2
shot cushion when they win. This isn’t what we are looking for, but, before we leave, let’s take a look at shots on target.
As you can see here, Team Away wins slightly more often by putting more shots on frame, but they only outshoot Team Home in total shots on target in 42% of the games they win. That is certainly not the key factor to winning we are looking for.
Team Home vs. Team Away: Better Shot Quality (xG per shot)
And there you have it. The visualization tells the story. Team Away wins when they get better quality shots than Team Home does. Not more shots--or even shots on target--but better quality shots on average (or on median, it works both ways). 79% of Team Away wins are games where they get better quality shots based on xG per Shot.
52% of the games where Team Away wins on xG per Shot, they also win the game. 34% of the time, they get a draw. That’s a positive result 86% of the time. When Team Away wins on cumulative xG, that goes down to 73% of the time, so the advantage in better vs. more is 13%.
Again, don’t focus on the mechanics of “xG per Shot”, focus on what it represents: better quality shots for Team Away than Team Home gets. You have to play good defense and stop the opponent from being too dangerous, and force them to take low quality shots, like Real Salt Lake just did in holding the Seattle Sounders to 1 xG over 22 shots. Team Home likes to shoot--a lot. Use that to your advantage.
Better quality shots equals higher goal conversion rates. Goal Conversion Rate Difference is a key staple of top teams. Does getting a road penalty help? Absolutely, but the fact is that doesn’t happen very often. Only 2.6% of 2021 games were decided by a Team Away penalty.
Does this actually matter? Yes. Yes, it does.
Let’s look at a particular team who did this historically well in 2021, the New England Revolution. On the road, they won 10, lost three, and drew four. For comparison, the next-best team in the Eastern Conference, the Philadelphia Union, were 3-5-9 away from home.
How did the Revolution do it? Well, in 17 games, they were outshot 234 to 277. Their xG was 28.2 to their opponent’s 28.0--not that great. But, of course, they had an xG per Shot of 0.12 while their opponents had 0.10. This led to a Goal Conversion Rate of 14.1% compared to their opponents’ 7.9% and a dominant 33 goals for and 22 against.
Next best in the Supporter’s Shield race? The Colorado Rapids, winners of the West. They got maybe a touch lucky, but they turned in numbers that matched up pretty well with their 8-6-3 road record: 217 shots for to 242 against and they had an xG lower than their opponents: 20 xG to 25.1 xG. The problem was they didn’t get into good scoring positions: 0.097 xG per shot to their opponents’ 0.104. This led to a decent, but not amazing, Goal Conversion Rate of 9.2% to 8.3% (perhaps a bit lucky on the defensive side), and 20 goals both for and against.
If you look at the Seattle Sounders’ excellent 9-4-4 away record, you see numbers more similar to the Revolution: outshot, but with a much better xG per Shot (0.12 vs 0.08), leading to 25 goals for and 17 goals against.
The outcomes match the data. We could do this all day long, because it holds up for practically every MLS team.
Conclusion
So next time you are wondering why your team keeps losing on the road or what your chances are going into an MLS Cup Playoff elimination game, keep in mind that away teams lose half the time and win only a quarter of the time, unless you get better quality chances. Focus then on the quality of the chances and not the number of chances, and you’ll be much more sane about how your team performs when they aren’t in front of the home crowd.
Want to improve on the road? Figure out how successful teams create quality chances and what you need to do to get to that level. We’ve got some great articles for a starting point with many more to come. Enjoy the playoffs and MLS Cup.