MLS Is Back: Week One Highs And Lows

MLS Is Back: Week One Highs And Lows

My excellent colleagues at ASA have done some terrific work in rolling out Goals Added (g+) the past couple months, putting out methodology articles, and finding new and creative ways to assess player performance on the pitch through this metric. We highly recommend you read the articles linked above, but g+ is the model we built to assign value to every single on-ball action that happens in a soccer game. The return of MLS has given us at ASA the first extended period of which to use this g+ data since the league’s restart, so through the medium of video analysis I will be looking at some of the major actions of g+ during the first week of action. I’ll be giving context to the numbers behind it: where the players did well, where they did poorly, and why g+ afforded them the values they were given!

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With Or Without You (WOWY): a plus-minus alternative for soccer

With Or Without You (WOWY): a plus-minus alternative for soccer

Plus-minus measures the impact of a player on their team’s performance. Originally invented by hockey general managers, every player on the ice is awarded a plus when their team scores a goal while every opponent player on ice gets a minus. The higher the plus-minus rating, higher the net positive of goals scored for a player’s team. In terms of plus-minus, the beste player has the highest plus-minus score, and the worst player has the lowest. Plus-minus has also been modified for use in basketball, first by 82games, and now more famously by ESPN

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