MLS according to g+: The Overperforming, the Underperforming, and the Ugly Part 3
/by Mark Asher Goodman, @soccer_rabbi
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.
For soccer, anyone outside of the playoffs could be said to be ‘underperforming’. A few teams that expect to be fantastic every year - NYRB, LAFC, LA Galaxy, and Atlanta United - could also be said to have underperformed. But here at ASA, the term ‘underperform’ is used to describe teams that did a lot worse than the g+ model might have expected.
If you came here looking for teams playing as expected (TOR, SEA, SKC, NYC, COL, NYRB, NSH, RSL, ATL, MTL, SJ, HOU, VAN, CIN, DCU) or teams that are overperforming and perhaps due for regression (CLB, PHI, DAL, ORL, POR, MNU) I wrote that already. Go here or here.
Note: Most g+ stats are from before matches on Decision Day Sunday, November 8. Games played, PPG, Goals For and Against are current.
The Underperforming
In MLS this year, six teams have drastically underperformed expectations: New England, LAFC, Miami, LA Galaxy, and Chicago. Why they underperformed will take the entire offseason to unpack, but we’ll take an early stab at it right here, first.
Perpetual MLS bridesmaids New England Revolution went through three consecutive out-of-the-playoffs finishes in 2016, 2017, and 2018, with Jay Heaps presiding over the first two and Brad Friedel managing the third. A bad start to 2019 resulted in Friedel’s midseason removal, at which point the already retro Revs (check out their badge - the only original MLS crest that dates back to the inaugural 1996 season) went full retro by hiring US Soccer legend Bruce Arena.
If ASA had an arch-nemesis in US Soccer, it would be Bruce Arena.
Despite his revulsion to looking at things like numbers which help describe who is good and who is bad at specific soccer skills, you cannot deny that, in general, Arena gets results. He’s collected 5 MLS Cups, 5 NCAA College Cups, and 3 MLS Coach of the Year Awards. This year, his Revs have been alright - they sit 6th in the Eastern Conference on 32 points, good enough for the playoffs. But they’ve hardly been inspired. They never strung more than two wins together back-to-back, and their 26 Goals Scored is 9th out of 14 Eastern Conference teams. Their g+ differential is a +8.93 - fourth in the league. They should be really good.
Their problem is finishing. New England’s Team Passing g+ is the best in all of MLS at 5.17, which produces an impressive xG rate of 35.68. They’ve underperformed their Expected Goals in 2020 by a shockingly bad -9.68.
The just… don’t finish shots. The Revs are 3rd in the league with 331 shots, but of the 15 players on the team with more than 800 minutes played, 13 players have a zero-or-negative G-xG rate, meaning they miss shots that the models expect them to make most of the time. The team fires up enough bricks to build them an actual soccer stadium that might finally get them out of the ugly, cavernous, throw-ball-lined Foxboro Stadium. If it weren’t for Teal Bunbury’s impressive 8 goals on 5.09 xG, things would be even worse.
This team is going to the playoffs. And normally one might look at an underperforming team as a ‘value buy’ for pundits and punters. But for my money, New England look like a simple team for any opponent to solve in the first few rounds: guard Teal Bunbury; don’t worry too much about the other guys. They couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a lobstaah boat.
At the season’s beginning, I wrote that LAFC should “feel like anything short of winning MLS Cup, perhaps a second Supporters Shield, or becoming the first-ever MLS team to win the Scotiabank Concacaf Champions League, should be considered abject failure.” And so here we are, the end of Week 23 of this weird season, and the Soccer Angels sit a pedestrian 7th in the Western Conference, with a pretty ‘meh’ 9W-8L-5T record. Yeah, they’ve underperformed their g+ expectations - you’d expect them to be 4th when they are actually 11th in the overall standings- but LAFC really expect to be the league’s best with the talent they have. They had the best midfield in the league in 2019 with Latif Blessing, Eduard Atuesta, and Mark Anthony Kaye, and they had the MLS MVP in Carlos Vela. As long as they retained those key guys, they could stay near or at the top of the league even if they shed some other players, right?
Nope!
In the offseason prior to 2020, the black and gold ditched goalkeeper Tyler Miller, right back Joao Moutinho, and center back Walker Zimmerman. Moutinho and Zimmerman have looked great for their new teams, helping them to the playoffs for the first time this year; while Miller started out well before injuring his hip and getting shut down for the rest of 2020. LAFC replaced the outfield guys with a mixture of Diego Palacios, Tristan Blackmon, Dejan Jakovic, and Jesus Murillo, all of whom are towards the bottom of the team in g+. At keeper, Kenneth Vermeer’s +3.00 G-xG was 33rd out of 37 keepers with more than 500 minutes played (positive numbers mean keepers allow more goals than the model expects). Because Vermeer was bad, Bob Bradley gave him only 704 minutes between the sticks, and tossed the remaining 1371 minutes of the season to Pablo Sisniega, Miller’s former backup. Sisniega produced only marginally better results in goal, with +1.52 G-xG, 27th in the league.
Their former GK, Miller, finished 3rd in the league with -4.45 G-xG in 2019, and they sold him off for … $200,000 of GAM and TAM. I will never understand that decision, and I feel a sense of regretful schadenfreude in watching LA’s new GK tandem muck it up. If you like simple answers to simple questions, you could reasonably claim that LAFC would be playing as expected by their g+ numbers - more wins, higher position in the league table - if their keepers weren’t near the bottom of the league in shot-stopping. As it stands, they’re 9th out of 12 teams in the Western Conference in Goals Allowed.
On top of all that, Carlos Vela has missed 11 games this year with a knee injury, and although Diego Rossi has been superb, LAFC just isn’t the same without their MVP. He is back, but is clearly still readjusting.
LAFC are supposed to be perennial contenders. This year, they look like a team that would be lucky to scrape into a semi-final. Not good enough.
Miami, based on the gap between where they rank in g+ differential and actual won-lost record, are tied with LAFC as the most underperforming team in Major League Soccer. Their g+ of +3.97 says they should be 8th, but they are instead 19th on points. That persistent underperformance had them in the position of needing a result and a few other teams to lose on Decision Day in order to back into the playoffs - and they got it. But their uninspiring season performance of 7W-13L-3T is pretty putrid. What’s wrong here?
Simply put, they play like Manchester United, but they score like Nashville SC. Miami are a fluid and creative side that want to build through the midfield and flow down the wings. It means they’re going to concede some goals, but they’re also supposed to produce goals. Expected Goals For thinks they ought to have 29.81 goals. They have 23.
The problem is pretty straightforward, and it is a recurrent one in MLS. Let’s call it the Marquez - Matthaus - Lampard Conundrum.
Let’s say you’re a team. Maybe an expansion team. You want a *sexy* international star to bring to your club to juice the box office and play *sexy* soccer and also sell shirts. Yeah, it’d be nice to win a cup too, but that’s really a problem for year three. Right now you need to *make a splash*. But because MLS isn’t particularly profitable yet, even though your owner is a billionaire, he won’t shell out a mega transfer fee for a player in the prime age of 24 to 28 years old. You need a declining star, from Europe, who will come on a free transfer, and who happens to be available in exactly the right window. That guy likely is choosing between your team, with the American lifestyle and the comforts of your lovely city that has beaches that come with it, and a team in China that will pay him at least double what you can shell out.
So you go out and get Gonzalo Higuain, a star with Real Madrid from 2006 to 2013, a guy that scored an amazing 38 goals for Napoli in 2015-2016, when he was (ahem) 27 years old. But his production has been declining ever since - 24 goals the next season, then 16, then 11, then 8.
You ignore the trend. You pay for the guy. Not unsurprisingly, in 766 minutes, he gives you 1 goal on 31 shots and just 11 Shots On Target against an xG of 3.49. He has fewer goals than defenders Brek Shea (4) and Leandro Gonzalez Pirez (2); teammates Julian Carranza and Juan Agudelo both have more goals with far fewer shots.
Pipa started his Inter South Beach career with a big PK miss
and things really haven’t gotten better as the season has gone on.
Miami will play an opening-round match against 7th-seeded Nashville SC, a team they lost to once and drew once in the regular season, and a team that defends well and strikes on the counter very well. If Inter squeak by, good for them, but they’ll need to address these scoring problems in the offseason unless they want to continue underperforming the mark.
I would love to just copy-paste everything I wrote about Miami for LA Galaxy. LA needed a big scorer and a big name, because LA, so they got Javier ‘Chicharito’ Hernandez. After a reported $9.4 million transfer fee and $6 million in annual salary, Chicharito has produced -0.25 g+ . That’s a number identical to … the g+ of Gonzalo Higuain.
He has a disappointing 2 goals on an Expected Goals mark of 3.49, and has played just 722 minutes, forcing LA to play something called an Ethan Zubak in his place, although this so-called Zubak has a +0.27 g+ and 2 goals. There’s no MLS Players association data for 2020, but Zubak made $75,000 in 2019.
Alas, it is not enough to blame it all on Chicharito, for while the Gals were 19th in MLS in Goals Scored, they were also 25th out of 26 teams in Goals Conceded, with 46. The gap between what g+ against expected (22.47 g+ against) and what they actually allowed is stupendously large.
xG thinks GK David Bingham was bad. Bingham had the 2nd-worst G-xG in MLS in 2020 at +4.73, better than only San Jose’s Daniel Vega. Note that former Galaxy keeper Clement Diop was third-best in MLS this year (-3.61 G-xG) with his new team, Montreal, so, oops. In midfield, Perry Kitchen was average at defending (+0.09 g+ interrupting) but below-average overall (-1.69 g+) in 1843 minutes, while Joe Corona was only so-so (-0.21 g+) and Jonathan Dos Santos was injured much of the year. On the bright side, the backline has pretty good g+ numbers, actually. Daniel Steres (+0.92 overall g+, +0.51 g+ interrupting), Nick DePuy (-0.06 overall g+, + 0.43 g+ interrupting), Emiliano Insua (+0.49 overall g+, +0.47 g+ interrupting) and Julian Araujo ( +0.26 overall g+, +1.14 g+ interrupting) were all average-or-better for their positions overall and in defending. This tells us that they were asked to make a lot of stops, and they made the stops expected of them, and then some.
This might also demonstrate one of the weaknesses of g+ with regard to defending - if the midfield let through a lot of attacks, the defenders would be forced to make more tackles, clearances, blocks, etcetera. Sure, they might make most of them and their numbers would look good. But the sheer volume of quality chances they face will ultimately mean the team will concede more often. I can’t say for sure exactly why the g+ model underestimates the goals the Galaxy are supposed to concede, but I can tell you according to the eye test that their defense was bad, and I can also tell you that another defense that struggled, San Jose, also broke the g+ model - they conceded far more goals (51) than g+ allowed predicts (30.53).
Bad defenses confuse computers.
Chicharito has two more years left on his contract. The team’s other DPs are Cristian Pavon and Jonathan Dos Santos. Pavon will probably return from loan to Boca Juniors, since his buyout clause is reportedly $20 million; while Dos Santos probably won’t be back either. The Galaxy also need to find a head coach to replace Guillermo Barros Schelotto.
2021 will be the fourth rebuilding year in a row in Carson, CA.
Leave it to the unlucky Chicago Fire to start the 2020 season with a crest rebrand and a plan to escape their dull suburban field in Bridgeview, Illinois, for Soldier Field in search of new fans and big gate receipts - only to get schwacked with a pandemic. That was pretty bad. In 2019 the key players for this team were Bastian Schweinsteiger, Dax McCarty, and Nemanja Nikolic, all of who had been great in 2018 but were declining. So the front office went out to get some replacements, and picked out young DP Ignacio Aliseda, 29-year-old midfielder Gaston Gimenez, and Slovenian striker Robert Beric.
Those selections - also pretty bad. Aliseda (-1.22 overall g+), Gimenez (-0.46 g+) and Beric (-1.00 g+) were all on the wrong side of ‘average’, alongside returning defender Francisco Calvo (-1.10 g+). Yes, Beric did score 12 goals for the Fire, but g+ thinks his final-third turnovers in dribbling and passing more than offset his shooting.
Despite all that, they saw good seasons from Alvaro Medran (+1.76 g+), Fabian Herbers (+1.47 g+) and Djordje Mihailovic (+1.14 g+), but it didn’t offset in the aggregate.
I’m not an expert on the Fire - I only watched a handful of their games this season, and not closely. I do wonder whether trying to integrate three new DPs into the league in a wonky Covid-plagued year didn’t hurt them, along with bringing on a new coach, Raphael Wicky.
Maybe the Fire are a good metaphor for all of us in 2020 - not what we’d expected, vastly worse than what we could have fathomed, but looking forward to getting back on track in 2021.