Philadelphia Union: Postseason Preview

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Philadelphia Union: Postseason Preview

2019 REVIEW

Philadelphia is a city that seems to adorn itself with the pageantry of blue-collar work. The philosophy of determination and deep city grit is a sort of tattoo etched upon the marrow of its teams’ legacy through the years. The Flyers, Phillies, and Eagles all have that reputation, and the city’s adopted mascot/avatar is named “Gritty” for a very good reason. This year’s Union side maybe the iteration that most embodies that most core Philadelphian philosophy.

You sometimes might hear a coach says talk about their system or style of play and they say something like “we want the team to be the star”. There is no other team in this playoff pool that embodies this theme greater than the Philadelphia Union. They’ve been built through almost every available acquisition method in the MLS GM handbook. 

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Real Salt Lake: Postseason Preview

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Real Salt Lake: Postseason Preview


When the assignments came out for playoff previews I begged, pleaded, and asked Ian nicely for the opportunity to write about RSL (editors note: there was literally no other person interested). I feel like I somehow owe this fanbase a little something because of the harshness with my pre-season picks. Let me start off with this: I was wrong. Very wrong.

But. Let’s talk about why I was wrong.

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LA Galaxy - Postseason Preview

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LA Galaxy - Postseason Preview

In my view, the difference between the 2018 LA Galaxy and 2019 LA Galaxy was their willingness to come to terms with their direct style of play, their dependency upon their benevolent god Zlatan, and their need to score multiple goals to win games

No longer is there a pretentious and almost gaudy feel to the tactics employed in Carson. This is a team with fewer luxuries and is less about the use of high priced pieces in their line-up to do something amazing all leading to their unflappable success and glory. Now, there is only Zuul--errr Zlatan. But that has been good enough to buy them a lottery ticket for their sixth MLS Cup.

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Atlanta United FC - Postseason Preview

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In the 2019 Atlanta United Preview for ASA, I worried that de Boer’s preseason stated goal of “keeping everything the same in attack but improving the defense” might be a wild goose chase. After a title-winning 2018 in which Atlanta’s back 3/5 often found themselves in 1v1 duels and won them while putting up some of the best defensive metrics I’ve seen, the team opened 2019 in a 3-4-3 with Remedi and Nagbe holding and struggling to link defense and attack. Brek Shea became involved at left wing back when injuries early in the year basically put a hold on the first team career progression of young George Bello. The team quickly morphed into a 4-3-3 that de Boer seemed more comfortable with, but even after a month or so as the positive results started to show up against a run of weak competition, rifts in the dressing room were apparent to anyone who was even remotely paying attention. If it wasn’t Pity Martinez mouthing off to South American media about disagreements with the manager, and Leandro Gonzalez Pirez and Ezequiel Barco echoing certain of those sentiments at the All-Star break, it was Josef Martinez scoring a goal on the road and immediately and vigorously berating the coaching staff for all to see.

Whether by epiphany, mutiny, or simply good fortune, Frank de Boer permanently shifted the team away from a more “under control” 4-3-3 into a fairly wide-open and pressure-intensive 3-5-2 in July, and for the most part, the team never looked back.

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ASA Roundtable: The One About False Nines

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Welcome to another edition of the #asaroundtable, ASA’s weekly discussion forum. This week, our question comes from one of our regular contributors, Cheuk Hei Ho. If you have any questions you want asked, feel free to hit us up @AnalysisEvolved, or email us at americansocceranalysis@gmail.com. Cheuk, take it away. 

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This is the Very Model of a Modern Major Soccer League -

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Our model gives LAFC a 65% chance to win MLS Cup, which is admittedly an absurdly high figure. Such a figure requires that LAFC have, on average, greater than 85% chances of winning each of three games on their way to the championship. Despite getting all three of those games at home, 85% still feels almost impossible against some good teams. So I’m here to break down what factors are giving LAFC such good chances in our model, and why that model is “wrong.”

Let’s do it like this. LAFC is most likely to play Minnesota in the second round, a team that adequately represents the caliber of a typical MLS playoff team that LAFC will face. For reference, Minnesota was second in the conference in goal differential (GD) and third in the conference in expected goal differential (xGD). I’ll start as though Minnesota were playing itself on a neutral field, and then I’ll layer in the various factors that make LAFC different, and that get us to more than 85% chances of winning a knockout matchup.

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Records Are Fun Part 2: Let's Acknowledge Some Records Now That Carlos Vela Has Broken Them

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If you’re reading this website, you probably already know Carlos Vela has been quite good at soccer over the last several months. You probably even know that he set some records. If you’re a truly astute observer and loyal reader <link to old story>, you’ll even know the numbers he passed to set some of those records. Now that the regular season is over, let’s take a look at those marks - old and new - and look ahead at playoff records that he (or Zlatan, or Josef Martinez, or really any number of players) might take down in the coming weeks.

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The Great Goal Kick Shift

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The Great Goal Kick Shift

During the Renaissance era, the English language went through a revolution where vowel pronunciation radically changed. This was known as The Great Vowel Shift, and ultimately led to modern English. Similarly, in the late 2010s, goal kicks were revolutionized in what I am calling The Great Goal Kick Shift. Seemingly a worldwide phenomenon, the location where goal kicks were taken rapidly shifted from their traditional location at the corners of the 6-yard box towards the center of the field.

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Shots in the Dark: how data providers tell us different versions of what happened

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Shots in the Dark: how data providers tell us different versions of what happened

Recently, this tweet created a small firestorm in the soccer analytics community. While it is unclear the source of the error, it was pretty clear that there weren’t 1,300 passes and 50 shots in an English League 2 match. This led to responses from prominent analysts such as StatsBomb’s Ted Knutson (including on his podcast [starts at 10:45]), Opta’s (and ASA alum) Tom Worville and Ryan Bahia, and Chris Anderson, author of The Numbers Game. All of them were saying pretty much the same thing: question the data you are using. If the data you are using to analyze a problem is not valid, then your solutions won’t be either.

So what do we know about the data that is used for soccer analysis? Previous studies have shown that people are pretty good at agreeing about what type of event occured in a soccer game (e.g. shots, tackles). But as far as I can tell, the accuracy and precision of locations  of game events among the various data providers has not been studied. As Joe Mulberry pointed out when looking at the troubling inconsistencies between spatial tracking data and event data, small differences in locations can have big effects on downstream analysis including expected goals (xG) models. In other words, small inconsistencies in how data is tracked can have big consequences for the models built off that data. So what are the differences between how soccer data providers collect and report their data?

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Trapp Game: How Caleb Porter has changed the Crew

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Trapp Game: How Caleb Porter has changed the Crew

The year 2019 brought a new Crew. Anthony Precourt got his wish and slithered away to Austin, while head coach and sporting director Gregg Berhalter began his rehabilitation of the US national team, leaving behind five years of solid results in Columbus. Replacing them was a new ownership group and front office led by the Haslam and Edwards families. Toronto FC’s Tim Bezbatchenko came in to lead the Crew’s soccer operations and former MLS Champion Caleb Porter took over as the head coach. With the smallest offseason turnover of a perennial playoff team, expectations were that Porter would provide a steady hand for continued success this season. However, that hasn’t happened and Columbus remains third to last in the Eastern Conference with only a game left in the season. Did the transition fail to succeed because Porter couldn’t implement his vision, or because that vision just didn’t work?

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