A Tale of Two Central Defensive Midfielders

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Michael Bradley and Wil Trapp share several obvious qualities. They are both captains for club and country. They are both smooth passing defensive midfielders, and they both possess excellent heads of hair. Another similarity is that they rarely shoot or score goals, each collecting only one goal over the last three seasons. Coincidentally, both of those goals are what we could enthusiastically describe as "wonder-goals." Bradley's long-distance chip for the US national team in a World Cup qualifier against Mexico at the Azteca (a goal not remembered as fondly as it deserves due to the rest of qualifying) and Trapp for the Crew to win a match in stoppage time against Orlando City this past summer. However, one difference between these two players was how each responded to the confidence boost that came after scoring a once-in-a-career goal.

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Going to WAR for Points Above Replacement in Soccer

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Going to WAR for Points Above Replacement in Soccer

Baseball popularized the use of the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistic; representing a player’s estimated contribution to a team’s win tally above what a generic replacement would contribute. In this sense, it’s a roster management tool to support a keep/replace decision. However, WAR stats are often used by others for general performance comparisons. But soccer (or football if you like) does not have widespread use of a WAR-like statistic.

In soccer, performance indices are typically confidential and proprietary, making it difficult to verify their validity. Teams and analysts, understandably so, do not want to give away their competitive advantage. And those that are shared publicly, do not usually describe values in terms of team performance, or comparisons to replacements.

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Turf and Injuries: The Data Hurts

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Turf and Injuries: The Data Hurts

One of the most peculiar matches of the 2018 regular season occurred on August 18th. The LA Galaxy were already stretched thin from injuries to both dos Santos-es and Romain Alessandrini (their three DPs) and defender Michael Ciani for Sigi Schmid’s return to Seattle. But when they showed up in town, there was a huge name - perhaps the biggest name in MLS - missing from the lineup. That name was Zlatan, and by all indication his absence was voluntary.

By the end of the afternoon, the Galaxy really could have used one of the greatest players ever to kick a soccer ball. They ended up suffering their worst loss of the season and Seattle notched their best (5-0). Oh yeah, and the Galaxy missed the playoffs by less than three points.

We all know why he missed that game. It’s because the Sounders play on FieldTurf. There’s a perception out there that playing on artificial grass increases the risk of injury, and Zlatan had hurt his knee not long before (not on turf).

The superstar is not alone in his perception. I remember being disappointed not to see Thierry Henry play at CenturyLink Field in 2013. In fact, a group of Canadian researchers surveyed 99 MLS players back in 2011 and found that the vast majority (93%) said they believe third-generation artificial turf (FieldTurf) increases the risk of injury.

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Ranking MLS' Best Foreign Goalkeepers

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Ranking MLS' Best Foreign Goalkeepers

It’s hard not to have a love-hate relationship with the MLS offseason. On one hand, we get to talk about goalkeepers more often. (A massive plus for anyone.) Typically the narrative wraps up a year-long performance in one or two sentences - “Goalkeeper X will look to build off of last year’s success by relying on his shot stopping and distribution skills.” - but that’s hardly a problem considering the larger headache that resurfaces this time of year. Every January we hear about an unnamed MLS team being linked to a foreign goalkeeper. We just had one happen last week, with a “lucrative offer” apparently on the table for a German goalkeeper.

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Player Value Recap 2018: Refining a System for Ranking MLS Players

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Player Value Recap 2018: Refining a System for Ranking MLS Players

Creating an all-encompassing player value metric is an ongoing process, with more data adding more insight and texture to its meaning. But the challenges are worthwhile. The ability to compare players from different positions on equal footing, like PER for the NBA or WAR for MLB, allows one to test assumptions for what makes a team successful, how players fit together, and where resources might best be spent. If you haven’t already, read my pieces from last year (here are parts one and two). But this is an update on my progress to creating a metric to describe how game actions affect game outcomes, based on the context of team possessions.

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Why the new MLS Playoff format doesn't create a more meaningful regular season

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Why the new MLS Playoff format doesn't create a more meaningful regular season

Major League Soccer has updated their playoff format for 2019 to a March Madness style single elimination tournament that will take roughly a month play out. The prior competition used a combination of single elimination and home and away ties over a month and a half period, and had long breaks in the action. The one clear benefit of this change is the shortened duration of the tournament. Avoiding the November international window will create a compact and uninterrupted tournament that should improve the momentum of the story lines that emerge.

The new format is also supposed to benefit the higher seeds, as the single elimination games will give advantage to the home teams, versus the old method of home and away legs for each team. This seemingly makes regular season games more important. More Victory! [Insert scratching record sound here]. These types of simplifying statements make my geek antenna start to hone in on theoretical galaxies of mathematics. Sadly, the only off switch I have for my antenna is my keypad and a Google docs session. So let’s dig in and deconstruct this new tournament bracket and see who benefits and who does not.

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Our Favorite ASA Articles of 2018

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Our Favorite ASA Articles of 2018

During a recent American Soccer Analysis shareholders meeting in the penthouse suite of the swanky hotel we built in Minecraft (it’s our Slack channel), we discussed our favorite ASA articles of the past year. Because it is the season of listicles and we relish every chance to talk about ourselves, we decided to put them all together in one official post. Also, our site traffic is essentially zero at this time of year, so it seemed like an easy way for us to remember where we put them.

It was a great year for MLS (though perhaps not American soccer overall) and the most successful in our five year life as a website. We added interactive tables, introduced xPG, rebooted the podcast (new episode coming out soon! …probably), and added a lot of great new writers to our existing ranks of stale old writers. They’re not all represented in the list below, but special shout out to our weekly contributors who put together content every week - Little Things (@harrisonhamm21), Lowered Expectations (@harrison_crow), Expected Narratives (@ahandleforian), and Setting the Table (@ericwsoccer) - showed us the individual plays each week that made up the whole of the MLS season. We’d also like to extend a special thank you to Neil Greenberg of the Washington Post, for including us as a part of the WaPo’s incredible World Cup coverage.

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Evaluating Defensive Prospects for the Expansion Draft

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FC Cincinnati will face many difficult decisions over the next three months, as they build their expansion team to be ready for the 2019 season. Their next set of choices takes place today, in the Expansion Draft. What the team decides there may not make or break their season, but they do have the opportunity to add important pieces for their inaugural year.

One strategy, the path I’ll discuss here, is for Cincinnati to grab cheap, young players. The hope is that, while they weren’t key contributors for their former teams, those players will continue to develop. A team with enough of these works in progress, and with a sufficient capacity to develop them, might reasonably hope for a few to pan out into full-time starters.

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A Feast for Throws

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A Feast for Throws

In Game of Throw-Ins, I characterized and introduced an expected throw-in possession retention model (xRetain) for MLS. Go read the whole thing, but it showed that throw-ins are more likely to be completed and possession retained when they are thrown backwards, quickly, and outside a team’s defensive third. But what are MLS teams and players doing with their throw-ins?

To help differentiate teams’ throw-in styles, I turned to hierarchical clustering (see the graph below). I won’t get into mathematical details, but you can think of it sort of like an evolutionary tree. However, instead of the branches separating species, they are separating different throw-in angle frequencies. Kind of like how humans and chimpanzees are near each other on the branches of an evolutionary tree but far away from birds, teams which always throw the ball backwards and short will be far away from those that always take throw-ins forward and long.

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Game of Throw-ins

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Game of Throw-ins

Much has been written and studied about set pieces in soccer. Penalty kicks have been Bayesed multiple times, I’ve analyzed free kicks in MLS and at the World Cup, corner kicks have been rigorously studied. But what about the humble throw-in? Aside from when teams develop a long throw-in program (see Delap, Rory) they are largely ignored or even ridiculed, in the case of Liverpool hiring a throw-in coach (see the first comment here).


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