Toronto FC 2019 Season Preview

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Toronto FC 2019 Season Preview

Canadian Pastoral

 Perhaps the best novel by the late great author Philip Roth was American Pastoral. Roth introduced us to a character nicknamed  “The Swede” who followed a legendary athletic career as a youth with equal success as an adult, and lived a life that anyone would admire. From this contented perch the reader then watches as idealism and bad luck bring his idyllic life to ruins. It’s an unforgettable story of how the American dream can swallow itself and quickly turn tragedy.

 As I prepared to write this preview of Toronto FCs 2019 season this story kept resurfacing in my mind. Both are a riches to rags stories with no clear answers, and ones that grapples with the trade off of maintaining the status quo versus continuing to push. Not a year ago Toronto FC was on top of the soccer world in North America. They had just completed the greatest season in MLS history (yes, it still is) and were taking down Liga MX giants on their way to another height in winning the CONCACAF Champions League. They were achieving things like no MLS team before them. And then something happened….

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Colorado Rapids 2019 Season Preview

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Colorado Rapids 2019 Season Preview

Folks, this is what a re-build looks like. Dick’s Sporting Goods Park might as well have had a “Pardon Our Dust” sign posted at the ticket office every home match, and the only good thing about the Colorado Rapids’ 2018 season is that it’s over. Still, 2018 was not wasted by the club, with players joining and leaving the roster all year. In many ways, this was the “game” that fans, including myself, have really been paying attention to. Head coach Anthony Hudson and GM Padraig Smith certainly had their work cut out for them a year ago, and it’s clear that this was always going to be a multi-year process, especially given the two bloated Designated Player contracts expiring at the end of 2019.

The Rapids are poised for an interesting 2019 season as the roadies for Tim Howard’s Magical Retirement Tour. They won’t (and shouldn’t!) be on anyone’s playoff prediction lists, but they’ll be a sleeper pick by a couple experts (pump Bobby Warshaw’s takes directly into my veins). Now that seven teams from each conference get a playoff game, Colorado should strive to be in the hunt all year, and given the crapshoot that is MLS, there’s no reason to say they can’t make it. But playoffs or not, Rapids fans would be truly pleased with some wins, some goals, and some talented young players to carry the team into a new decade.

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FC Dallas 2019 Season Preview

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FC Dallas 2019 Season Preview

The 2018 season for FC Dallas feels like a lifetime ago, thanks in large part to massive changes the club undergone during the offseason. The face and heartbeat of the club, Oscar Pareja, left for a new challenge and after his departure the roster and coaching staff were overhauled in a matter of weeks. With the change comes a new wind of hope and optimism, especially when you hear the way newly minted head coach and former FCD Academy Director Luchi Gonzalez speaks so eloquently about his vision for Dallas in 2019, and how the newly formed North Texas Soccer Club will help bridge more FCD players from the Academy and the first team.

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Orlando City SC 2019 Season Preview

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Orlando City SC 2019 Season Preview

It was the worst of times. 2018 is a year that Orlando City fans could forget if it didn’t make up 25% of the team’s MLS existence. No, the dull scab of mediocrity that Orlando had become finally broke sometime in April of last year and the rest of the league was there to season aggressively with rock salt. Jason Kreis was dismissed, and while that was indeed understandable, James O’Connor’s task of righting a sinking ship has now unfortunately shifted into excavating a wreck. In a league that has had no shortage of underachievers in its youth and adolescence, Orlando’s 2018 was a special kind of dark comedy. They stepped on every conceivable rake, went out, purchased several new rakes at great expense, and then stepped on all of those as well.

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What it takes to win the Champions League

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What it takes to win the Champions League

There's something great about knockout tournaments, especially involving teams that are completely unfamiliar with each other. NCAA March Madness and the World Cup are perfect examples; seeing your favorite team play against a relative unknown like Murray St. or Ghana carries a little extra intrigue than your average game against a conference opponent. For MLS fans, CONCACAF Champions League embodies this opportunity.

Increasingly, CCL has been painted as an MLS vs. Liga MX referendum, one in which MLS teams steadily gain but never overtake Mexico's dominant position in the region. But lost in that narrative is that CCL includes teams from a handful of other countries, too. These MLS-Liga MX matchups will get the majority of publicity (starting with Sporting KC-Toluca in the first knockout round), but seven other MLS/Liga MX teams have to knock off Central American or Caribbean opponents before those glamour matchups are set in stone. If you think these first round matchups are just a formality, just ask an FC Dallas fan how their campaign went last year (spoiler alert: they lost to Panamanian side Tauro before they even got to face a Mexican team).

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Machine Learning the Crew

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Machine Learning the Crew

Machine learning is so hot right now and if Skynet is going to destroy all humans, it should at least know a little bit about Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew. To wit, I created a machine learning model to classify which position in a Gregg Berhalter 4-2-3-1 formation a player most likely played in during a single game.

I chose the Crew for a couple reasons. First, they are my favorite team. Second, they had consistent coaching for a long period of time with a defined style of play. The latter is very important, as the model has to be trained well in order for the results to make sense. Since the Crew almost always played a 4-2-3-1 that relied on ball possession to disorganize the defense and create goal opportunities (get used to that phrase USMNT fans) it was a perfect test of whether this kind of thing could be done.

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Model Update: Coefficient Blending

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Model Update: Coefficient Blending

With our most recent app update, you might notice that some numbers in the xGoals tables have changed for past years where it wouldn’t normally make sense to see changes. As an example, Josef Martinez had 29.2 xG in 2018, but updated app shows 28.7 (-1.7%). No, this is not an Atlanta effect, though I can understand why you might support such an effect. Gyasi Zardes lost 0.5 xG as well (-2.4%), and no one dislikes Columbus.

We have updated our xGoal models with the 2018 season’s data, and that is the culprit of all the discrepancies since the last version of the app. I have already cited the largest two discrepancies by magnitude, so this isn’t some major overhaul of the model. In fact, only 2018’s xG values have been materially adjusted.* The new model estimated 35.6 fewer xGoals in 2018 than it did before, equivalent to a 2.8% drop.

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How to find Transfer Market Success in MLS

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How to find Transfer Market Success in MLS

Analyzing Foreign Transfers to MLS with Survival Analysis

Finding success in the global transfer market is a critical part of a winning MLS season. While the U.S. is obviously progressing as a soccer nation, there just aren’t enough talented players from this country to satisfy its growing thirst for exciting play and trophies. Still, signing players that are unfamiliar with MLS has also been a risky prospect. Foreign signings with poor outcomes can waste valuable international roster spots, and destroy a team’s budget in a relatively low-spending league. However, Atlanta United and LAFC have shown that signing players who can contribute immediately can make an expansion team an immediate contender. Understanding the historical structural patterns in the success and failure of past MLS teams could offer insights into navigating these decisions, for both future teams and those who need players for 2019 and beyond. Obviously, the most important considerations for signing a player have to do with style of play and personality, but understanding general hotspots and mistakes could improve the odds of signing foreign players who succeed in MLS.

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