Where Goals Come From: How The Best Teams in MLS Pass

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Where Goals Come From: How The Best Teams in MLS Pass

This is the fifth article in a series of articles and videos in the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter.

By now, readers of the Where Goals Come From project will be very in tune with the benefits of progressive passing in soccer, both from a data and tactical perspective. Within these last few weeks you’ve probably noticed a trend about the scope of progressive passing and its effectiveness throughout all levels of men’s and women’s football, furthering its importance within the game as a means of scoring goals (you know...where goals come from).

However, as American Soccer Analysis, we would be remiss to not put one specific league under the microscope and take a deeper look: in this case, Major League Soccer. In doing so, I’m going to look at the various tactical schemes the “defining” teams of the past three seasons in MLS have used to find success. These teams are:

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Where Goals Come From: Passing in the Final Third

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Where Goals Come From: Passing in the Final Third

This is the fourth article in a series of articles and videos in the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter.

In case you missed it

A companion article to this one

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Where Goals Come From: The Five Progressive Passes

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Where Goals Come From: The Five Progressive Passes

This is the third article in a series of articles and videos in the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter.

Parts one and two:

A companion article to this one:

In part one, we showed how teams that score more goals per game and per season use progressive passes to set up shots that are more likely to be scored than other types of shots, regardless of league or level in the professional game. Teams that concede fewer goals over time generally start by conceding fewer goals created from progressive passes. To maximize goal differential, clubs should focus on areas that have the biggest impacts.

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Where Goals Come From: Tactical Progressive Passing Movements

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Where Goals Come From: Tactical Progressive Passing Movements

This is the second article in a series of articles and videos in the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter. Read part one on Where Goals Come From.

Scoring goals in soccer is hard. Broadly speaking, in the elite European leagues, most matches have no more than three goals per game. This scarcity in goal scoring is the reason why metrics such as Expected Goals (xG) have gained such a foothold amongst the analytics (and increasingly the general) community: anything to gauge the value of a team’s chance creation is gold dust.

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Where Goals Come From

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Where Goals Come From

This is the first article in a series of articles and videos from the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter.

Regardless of philosophy, style, principles, and game model, a club’s on-field strategy should focus on maximizing goals scored and minimizing goals conceded. Goals win points, points are how clubs reach their objectives, and clubs that reach their objectives win fans and make money. The “Where Goals Come From” project is about how to create goals (or prevent them). By breaking soccer down to basics, we aim to provide clubs a clear roadmap to success.

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MVP, Positions, and the Problem with Usage in Soccer

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MVP, Positions, and the Problem with Usage in Soccer

Way back in May, American Soccer Analysis broke out our fancy new model, Goals Added, as a way to help us evaluate what is actually going on during the innards of a possession that drives chance creation. As John Muller so aptly put it, “Thanks to expected goals, we’ve gotten good at valuing shots, but shots won’t tell you much about the ninety-plus-minute scramble that produces just 26 total chances over the course of your average MLS game and maybe three goals if you’re lucky. Shots make up about three seconds of action for every four minutes of soccer. Grading the sport on that alone is like assigning GPA based on how well students walk across the graduation stage.” Goals Added gave us the chance to see how much the water carriers and the ball winners and the zone movers actually impact things, beyond just looking at your fancy DP strikers.

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Making the Most from Trading: Setting Your Team Up For Success in the MLS Transfer Market

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Making the Most from Trading: Setting Your Team Up For Success in the MLS Transfer Market

In Major League Soccer circles, the words and phrases “GAM”, “TAM”, “Allocation Order”, and “Superdraft” are commonplace whereas those same words and phrases are completely meaningless to fans of non-US leagues. This dichotomy of understanding comes from the uniqueness in MLS player acquisition rules. In addition to signing a player through a traditional transfer, MLS offers its teams many unique ways to acquire players, including trades, a draft of college players, expansion and re-entry drafts, and free agency. These different ways to acquire players also presented another opportunity to teams: they are able to trade for players in currency other than money. Teams can trade International Slots, College Draft Picks, GAM, TAM, and more.

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The Unofficial 2020 MLS MVP Finalists

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The Unofficial 2020 MLS MVP Finalists

The finalists for the Landon Donovan MVP award were announced this past week. The nominees are Andre Blake, Nicolas Lodeiro, Jordan Morris, Alejandro Pozuelo, and Diego Rossi. The winner will be chosen by current MLS players, MLS club employees, and select media members. There is no set criteria for how the MVP is chosen; voters can choose whoever they think is most deserving of the award. Luckily, American Soccer Analysis developed the robust goals added (g+) metric that will add another layer to the debates. Since g+ measures every single action completed on the pitch, we can use this metric to be able to determine the most “valuable” field player. That brings us to the question: what does it mean to be most valuable? I propose five methodologies that can be used to determine the 2020 MVP using g+.

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Explaining our 2020 MLS playoffs projections

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Explaining our 2020 MLS playoffs projections

Predicting playoff outcomes in MLS has always been particularly difficult. While about 400 regular season games may seem like a lot, it is still not even close to enough of a sample size to home in on fine differences between teams through the data alone. And now, with a COVID-shortened season and fake home games, it’s even more difficult. With that said, here are our model’s predicted probabilities of each team making it to each stage of the MLS Cup Playoffs, along with the implied championship probabilities from the Bovada sportsbook and championship probability differences between the two. I’ll go over what we did to produce these predictions, and what missing information could make them better.

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MLS according to g+: The Overperforming, the Underperforming, and the Ugly Part 3

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MLS according to g+: The Overperforming, the Underperforming, and the Ugly Part 3

We have reached the conclusion of the 2020 MLS season, and it happens to coincide with the conclusion of the long, LONG 2020 US election. And the two things share a lot in common - first and foremost among them being the all-important question of “who won?” and “who lost?”

But when the contest is at its end, or a season is nearly over, hand-wringing and analysis is all that’s left - the ‘woulda-shoulda-couldas’ of the world that keep a veritable army of pundits employed in our country. The most important thing for these folks to look at is underperformance: how did we do this thing, expecting it would have a certain result, and not get the desired result? For the election, a few things obviously underperformed; namely, pollsters, who had predicted a robust blue wave that did not manifest; and Democrats, who faced a let down across the country, from the results of the presidential election in Florida to the Maine senate race between Sara Gideon and Susan Collins.

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