2026 NWSL Previews: Portland Thorns, KC Current

/

Our 2026 NWSL Season Previews have started and today we hit Portland and KC.. If you want to support this coverage of the league, you can head to our Patreon. For $5 a month you can get access to a lot of the data visualization tools we use to make these previews.

If you’re more of an audio person, our friends at Expected Own Goals spoke to Phuoc Nguyen from Stumptown Footy to talk Portland, and Cindy Lara from the KC Sports Journal on the Current, available wherever you get your pods. If you want to support them, you can head to their Patreon.

Read More

2025 NWSL Previews: Portland Thorns and North Carolina Courage

/
2025 NWSL Previews: Portland Thorns and North Carolina Courage

Hello and welcome to our 2025 NWSL previews. We’ve got some new writers, some old writers, but lots of exciting analytical insights coming at you ahead of a very exciting 2025 season. You can read all of them here!

If you want some extended audio preview content, check out the xOwn Goals Podcast (available wherever you get your pods).

And if you want to support the best women’s stats content on the internet, consider checking out the ASA Patreon. There’s a patron discord, and all sorts of cool tools you can use to analyze the soccer.

Read More

2022 NWSL Season Previews: Chicago Red Stars, Portland Thorns FC, Washington Spirit

/
2022 NWSL Season Previews: Chicago Red Stars, Portland Thorns FC, Washington Spirit

The 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 More

Beckie with the Good Stats

/
Beckie with the Good Stats

Janine Beckie Transfers to Portlanada

At the theoretical height of her powers, Janine Beckie, former 8th-overall pick in the NWSL draft, is back Stateside with a point to prove. With her contract with Manchester City ending at the end of this year, Beckie made the move to join the very Maple Leaf-centric Portland Thorns, a move no doubt aided by the obvious Canadian throughlines of Rhian Wilkinson, Karina LeBlanc, and her strike partner-in-crime Christine Sinclair. I’ll save the Thorns tactical breakdown for our preseason previews post Challenge Cup (keep your eyes peeled), but who exactly are the Thorns getting?

Read More

How Sophia Smith Turns Good Passes Into Great Ones

/
How Sophia Smith Turns Good Passes Into Great Ones

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 More

The Most Interesting Teams in the NWSL Challenge Cup So Far

/
The Most Interesting Teams in the NWSL Challenge Cup So Far

The preliminary rounds of the Challenge Cup are wrapped up. The seeds are set.

While the first few games saw teams experiment with styles of play and roster rotation (at least for some teams), teams now have to put the pieces together as the knockout rounds begin. We looked at the performances of a couple teams to see where they’re succeeding, and more importantly, what they need to improve upon to be successful in their knockout matches. Here's a look at four of the teams we found most interesting thus far.

Read More

NWSL Mini-Previews: OL Reign, Portland Thorns, and Utah Royals FC

/
NWSL Mini-Previews: OL Reign, Portland Thorns, and Utah Royals FC

In the time since the first round of mini-previews, the 2020 NWSL season has taken the form of a short tournament called The Challenge Cup, which is to be played from the end of June until the end of July. Many questions remain about how the competition will shape up, including which players will ultimately choose to participate. In this edition of mini-previews, we travel out west to preview OL Reign, Portland Thorns, and Utah Royals FC. From name changes to significant roster overhauls to new coaching staff, each of these teams has something new in store for the upcoming season.

Read More