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I’m not gonna lie, I wrote the Western Conference and I liked it. I liked it so damn much that I didn’t want to write about the Eastern Conference and you know why, because there is so much more going on. It’s twice as deep and a mile wide.
But what the hell, Kieran wants both halves and what Kieran wants, Kieran gets. Just like the Supernatural theme I went with in the first half of this, it has dragged on far longer than it should have and while most of it doesn’t work just be kind to me for old time sake.
This year has been … wild. I’m not even just talking about the MLS season. Just within ASA itself it’s been wild and once or twice it’s been exactly that meme between Liz lemon and Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock where Liz looks at Jack and sighs exasperated saying “what a week, huh” and Jack casually strolls away while saying “Lemon, it’s Wednesday”.
What to know about the newest ASA platform
Have you ever wished that you could picture the game in front of you? Not as a broadcast, or a highlight video, but on a sheet of paper? All of a midfielder’s passes, your striker’s shots, an opponent’s tendencies, visualized? Previously, that required access to data, coding knowledge, and hours spent reinventing the wheel, just to see the most fundamental aspects of our game in graphic form. Not anymore.
Introducing American Soccer Analysis’ newest public platform: ASA VizHub. Making use of ASA’s extensive database, VizHub does the hard work for you, allowing for easy generation of industry-quality graphics.
This week, we published extracts of Major League Soccer’s roster profile releases to our GitHub. In addition to parsing the information the league provides about each club’s roster construction and each player’s contract status, we’ve also matched the teams and players to their respective American Soccer Analysis ID. For our fellow programmers and spreadsheet enthusiasts, this provides a link to performance, salary, and other publicly available data, which continues to be accessible through resources like itscalledsoccer.
In the same repository, we’ve open-sourced the code used to produce these extracts. Users are encouraged to report any bugs, recommend improvements, and/or contribute themselves.
Looking ahead, we also intend to incorporate this data into the application, as well as keep pace with future releases from MLS HQ. Stay tuned for those updates.
