Today is a really exciting day for us at ASA, as we get to add a new show to the ASA podcast feed by announcing that Expected Own Goals (@xOwnGoals) is our new women’s soccer podcast partner. Evan and Eric have built an awesome community covering (primarily) NWSL and American women’s soccer through a statistical lens in a way we haven’t seen anywhere else on the internet. If you’re already subscribed to the ASA podcast with Ben, Harrison, and Kieran, the xOG episodes will appear right in your feed. If you’re not, go do it! With the free data available for the NWSL here at ASA and their coverage, you’ll be hearing a lot more from us this NWSL season!

-ASA Team

For 20 years, Eric and I have been talking—about movies, about music, about baseball, about history, philosophy, literature, our feelings, our parents, our partners, and on and on and on. So it was only natural that women’s soccer would eventually be added to this list. Their more dangerous epiphany was that they should foist all this jibber-jabber on the public. Thus, Expected Own Goals was born.

What is Expected Own Goals? If you’re familiar with The ASA Show, you’ve got the general idea. We launched xOG just before the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, and dove deep both on the U.S. women’s national team and the entire 32-team field. It was a whirlwind, but we realized that there was no way we were gonna stop there.

After the tournament, we pivoted to prizing depth over breadth. Each week, we pick a single game to analyze, with appropriate context informing that discussion. We’ve spent a lot of time during the NWSL offseason analyzing transactions through an analytical lens, and we complete that project with NWSL Preview Week: seven episodes, previewing all 14 teams, released this week leading up to the start of the 2024 season. After that, we go back to a weekly release schedule analyzing one game a week. Kieran and Arianna “The Doc” Cascone will be dropping by regularly, as well as many other guests throughout the season.

This is a golden age for women’s football. More advanced data on the women’s game has become available in the public sphere over the last five years than any stathead could have ever dreamed possible. Evan remembers sitting in the Yurcak Field press box, using a rudimentary possession tallying app to try and figure out Sky Blue’s possession numbers during the 2015 season. Anyone watching the NWSL back then knows what a blessing places like ASA have become for helping to understand women’s soccer in America.

There is still so much more to do. It’s a little incredible that no podcasts dedicated exclusively to the tactical and analytics sides of women’s soccer exist in the United States. GMs and head coaches in the NWSL have fully embraced the use of data in their scouting, recruitment, and analysis of players and teams; the fans need to be brought into that tent, too.

It’s that big tent attitude that drew Eric and me to ASA in the first place. More and more of the best soccer data is being walled off by prohibitively expensive data providers whose first priority is to serve the teams willing to pay for it. The average soccer viewer doesn’t have that kind of money. But why should Prometheus make the rest of us pay top dollar to see what his burning stick can do?

Knowledge in soccer is now treated like yet another commodity, for sale only to those whose privilege allows them to access it. ASA’s mission is not to privatize, but to democratize. Eric and I couldn’t be happier to be part of that mission in a section of the soccer world which, thanks to the global pandemic of structural sexism, is crying out for it even more loudly.

I hope you all start listening and enjoying what we bring to that mission.

-Eric and Evan

American Soccer Analysis

Welcoming Expected Own Goals to the ASA Family