2022 MLS Season Previews: Austin FC, CF Montréal, and Charlotte FC
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The 2022 MLS season is nearly upon us! We’ll be publishing three team previews every weekday until the MLS season opens on Saturday, February 26, 2022.
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Introducing itscalledsoccer
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By Tyler Richardett and Brian Greenwood
For the latter half of 2021, American Soccer Analysis has been working on an R and Python library to make it easier to programmatically interact with our data. Today, we are happy to announce the release of the library which we've dubbed itscalledsoccer . If you want to get started right away, the library is available for download from CRAN and PyPI, and the source code can be found here.
In this article, we'll talk a bit about how we built the library and walk through a basic example or two.
Read MoreBob Bradley: Possession, Pressing, and Personnel
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Heading into Toronto on a snowy December day in past years may have had visitors buzzing about the state of BMO Field’s snowy pitch in preparation for an MLS Cup final. For now, there is just roster talk. Roster talk, and manager talk. Enter Bradley. Not the old Bradley we’ve come to know and love, but the even older Bradley who is new to us.
Read MoreHow Away Teams Win in MLS (and how to be like them)
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Short answer? They don't win. Or at least not enough. This has been discussed ad nauseum on the interwebs for a while, but the MLS home field advantage is the strongest of any of the five major professional sports in the US.
Not only that, it is considered one of the strongest home field advantages in professional soccer.
Read MorePriors and Penalties: Finding the best penalty takers with Bayes
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It’s MLS playoff time, and that means the possibility of penalties and shootouts. Rodrigo Schlegel led Orlando to victory after Pedro Gallese was sent off. Zack Steffen earned a move to Manchester City, in large part, due to leading Columbus to two penalty shootout victories. Portland named a bar in Providence Park after the famous double post shot in the marathon 2015 shootout against Sporting KC. Seattle won their first MLS Cup without registering a shot on goal by winning a shootout. Landon Donovan blasted his penalty over the bar to hand RSL the 2009 MLS Cup. Penalties and shootouts are remembered in ways that few other plays are.
Read MoreWhere Goals Come From: How Do You Train The Killer Pass?
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Introduction
In our last article, Jamon introduced the concepts of the “killer final balls” that lead to the best goal conversion rates - those types of key passes that are the most efficient and dangerous. More specifically, the two most “deadly” types of passes in this sub-category are through-balls and cutbacks. As is always the case with this series, our purpose is to create a framework which is actionable and applicable to teams- theory has very little meaning for us.
Read MoreHow Sophia Smith Turns Good Passes Into Great Ones
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Ask any data analyst about the utility of statistics and you’ll get any number of answers, from the ability to measure shot quality to the potential to build all-in-one impact measurements, such as American Soccer Analysis’ goals added, or g+ for short.
However, the most fundamental utility of data is not found in the answers it provides, but in how it empowers us to ask questions.
For example, while pouring through ASA’s numbers on Sophia Smith in anticipation of a piece on her and the Portland Thorns, I noticed something curious. Despite dominating the NWSL in xG, she came off looking far more mediocre in Receiving g+, ranking only 26th among her peers (xG and g+ data accurate as of October 30th).
Read MoreWhere Goals Come From: Playing the Killer Final Ball
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This is the third article of Season Two and tenth overall article in a series of articles and videos in the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter.
In our last article, we discussed how Expected Goals (xG) helps us evaluate the quality of the shots that a team takes and concedes. That evaluation can happen with individual shots, with a full game, several games (looking at trends), and over the course of a season. As we know from Season One of this series, the type of shot a player gives us a good indication of the typical Goal Conversion Rate (GCR), starting with the very effective shots from Through balls and Cutbacks. We have twelve types of shots in total in our framework, including penalty shots, across five different categories.
Read MoreHow much would it cost to buy the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup?
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Let’s pretend that we could buy the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup from the US Soccer Federation. It would not cost all that much, and in a sports universe where owners usually play the villains, we could be the heroes. A new owner would give life to a neglected tournament and return open soccer to the American consciousness.
Read MoreWe're Gonna Celebrate and Have a Good Time
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Tracking data is the next frontier in soccer analytics. Now that we have access to the location of every player on the field updated 25 times per second, we can measure things like off-ball runs and defensive positioning that were mostly invisible when using only event data. Tracking data holds the potential to unlock the game’s secrets. This article is not going to solve soccer. It is going to solve something arguably even more important: who the best teammates are based on their goal celebrations.
When Metrica released their first few games of anonymized tracking data over a year ago, I first dreamed of using tracking data to revolutionize how we look at goal celebrations. However, with just a handful of games available, and unknown players and teams, this dream would have to wait. But now, thanks to Major League Soccer and Second Spectrum, American Soccer Analysis has access to tracking data from the last couple of years of MLS play and the dream of measuring player celebrations can now be realized.
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