Hi. Evan from Expected Own Goals here. The NWSL regular season becomes past tense after this weekend, and with most players’ seasons more or less fully formed, we thought it was the perfect time to lay down our marker for the annual player awards.
Read MoreA hectic decision day has come and gone and the NWSL playoffs are soon upon us, as such it’s probably a good time to look at the Best XI by g+ in NWSL in 2023.
Read MoreWhile the World Cup is ready to begin off in the Land Down Under, the NWSL plows on with the 2023 Challenge Cup continuing through July and August while the top international players vie for glory. With the best players away, it poses an interesting question for fans and organizations alike, who is going to step up?
Read MoreIt’s not much of a stretch to say that of all the American professional sports drafts, the NWSL draft is the hardest to correctly map out. Upwards of 250 players register every year for 40 available slots. Tape on these players is scattered among a litany of different paywalled streaming services, each lower quality than the next. As such, scouting out each year's crop of prospects can be an arduous, and perhaps on some level impossible, task. Thankfully, we do have some objective ways to view potential draftees: stats. And thanks to an army of different filters and search criteria, I’ve created a list of 16 players across four position groups that stand out statistically for one reason or another.
Read MoreAnother 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).
Read MoreAt the theoretical height of her powers, Janine Beckie, former 8th-overall pick in the NWSL draft, is back Stateside with a point to prove. With her contract with Manchester City ending at the end of this year, Beckie made the move to join the very Maple Leaf-centric Portland Thorns, a move no doubt aided by the obvious Canadian throughlines of Rhian Wilkinson, Karina LeBlanc, and her strike partner-in-crime Christine Sinclair. I’ll save the Thorns tactical breakdown for our preseason previews post Challenge Cup (keep your eyes peeled), but who exactly are the Thorns getting?
Read MoreAmidst all the chaos that the 2021 NWSL season brought (which we won’t get into in this space) there was some fantastic soccer played. While the goals per 90 were at their lowest in many years, that did not mean the matches were without intrigue: the manufactured parity that is commonplace within the American sports ecosystem has thankfully not led to teams essentially being copycats of one another. Still, like almost any league, there exists a clear and definitive “style” which conditions what we see week in and week out.
Read MoreThe 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!
Read MoreThe preliminary rounds of the Challenge Cup are wrapped up. The seeds are set.
While the first few games saw teams experiment with styles of play and roster rotation (at least for some teams), teams now have to put the pieces together as the knockout rounds begin. We looked at the performances of a couple teams to see where they’re succeeding, and more importantly, what they need to improve upon to be successful in their knockout matches. Here's a look at four of the teams we found most interesting thus far.
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