Ask anybody around my age (now pretty old!) to describe their first experience playing Pokemon Red or Blue, and they can probably tell you. From Professor Oak being unsure of your gender, to the feeling when you first venture into the grass to wrangle a Rattata, those first moments of stepping into a much bigger world are seared onto our consciousnesses even decades past the game’s release.
Read MoreThe United States Men’s National Team Twitter community is an interesting place. While there is lots of good stuff there, like detailed tactical analysis and extensive coverage of every bounce pass, there is also a large contingent of people that seem to hate everything about soccer in this country. Win or lose, you’ll see them in the replies of many tweets from US Soccer or journalists confidently expressing why whatever just happened is bad for the current and future state of American soccer and they have the solution.
Read MorePressing has become a bigger and bigger part of the identity of soccer globally within the last decade. MLS teams have shifted along with the global trends. Take the New York Red Bulls and Philadelphia Union: two teams with an aggressive pressing style fundamental in the clubs’ DNA and instilled from the very top of the organization. More and more MLS teams are pressing aggressively, and though not all teams are following the all-out model set by the Red Bulls and Union, pressing has become a standard element of many teams’ gameplans.
But how widespread is it really? And what are some of the key differences in strategies? Using pressure data from Football Reference and Statsbomb, I tried to make some sense of where MLS teams stand in the pressing landscape.
Read MorePhiladelphia Union’s head coach Jim Curtin created a bit of a stir (at least on the ASA Slack) when Joe Tansey tweeted a short quote from Curtin’s weekly press conference:
Read MoreThe 2022 NWSL season is nearly upon us! We’ll be publishing three team previews every weekday until the NWSL regular season opens on Friday, April 29, 2022. Previews will be released in reverse order of how each team finished in the 2022 Challenge Cup’s group stage. You can find all of them here!
Read MoreThe 2022 NWSL season is nearly upon us! We’ll be publishing three team previews every weekday until the NWSL regular season opens on Friday, April 29, 2022. Previews will be released in reverse order of how each team finished in the 2022 Challenge Cup’s group stage. You can find all of them here!
Read MoreThe 2022 NWSL season is nearly upon us! We’ll be publishing three team previews every weekday until the NWSL regular season opens on Friday, April 29, 2022. Previews will be released in reverse order of how each team finished in the 2022 Challenge Cup’s group stage.
Read MoreThe Philadelphia Union are off to their best start in team history. They sit among the league leaders with 17 points in the first eight games and have looked in control in doing so, amassing +6 xGD in the process. But a funny thing happened on the way to the top of the league table. The Union’s pass completion percentage has dropped to 66%, the worst rate in the league in the last 10 years.
Read MoreOver the last few years, analytics in MLS has been turned on its head. Whereas five years ago if a team had one person “doing analytics” it was a big deal. Now, questions are asked if a club doesn’t and it is not uncommon for clubs to have multiple people on staff. With the hiring of the league’s first general manager that came up through analytics, DC United’s Lucy Rushton, a new system was needed to grade MLS teams. This system is not based on how well teams utilize analytics like previous editions, in part because that can be very hard to know from the outside, but on the number of people, a team employs to do it.
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