This is the first article of Season Two and ninth overall article in a series of articles and videos in the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter.
In the eight articles of Season One of the Where Goals Come From project we demonstrated how “progressive pass” goals make up 40% of the goals scored in professional soccer.
Read MoreFormations are a lie, for the most part. We all know this by now; learning a team’s formation generally tells you very little about how they play. One reason for this is that positions are also a lie. Nani and Diego Rossi are both wingers on paper, but anyone who watches the two knows that they play very differently. We’ve made more specific terms, like inverted winger, to help describe the difference. But what if you hadn’t seen a player play yet? What if you’d like some objective way to define a player’s role beyond just their position? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a data-driven way of determining a playstyle that we could use to give us an idea of how a winger...wings?
Read MoreI will start this with a disclaimer: this is not how Borussia Dortmund or Manchester United incorporate analytics into their coaching workflow, it’s not even how the Colorado Rapids incorporate data into their coaching. It is a look at the opposite side of the same coin Carl Carpenter examined earlier this week, only for a smaller school without access to the biggest and baddest equipment.
Read MoreChris Armas is fighting a losing battle; in 2018, Jesse Marsch’s Red Bulls were one of the best teams in MLS. Their expected goal differential (xGD) was the fourth best since 2016, only behind Toronto (2016), Atlanta United (2018), and Los Angeles FC (2019). They were so good that many are sure that had Marsch stayed, they would have won the MLS Cup last year. Anything less than that was seen as a failure, which made a peaceful transition to a new era almost impossible in the critics’ eyes.
Read MoreIf you haven’t read The Watchability ranking overview... please go do that now and then come back here and read this. Okay? Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you.
(taps foot)
(ugh-huh)
Okay you done? Don’t lie to me, did you read it? Okay, good.
Now, this might seem obvious but the scores of each team are combined and then divided by two, giving us the total game score. The higher the score the higher probability the match will be enjoyable to watch. Likewise the lower the score the high probability it’ll be... well, probably less fun to watch.
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