Season Previews: Montreal, Charlotte, Portland

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Columbus Deux: Boogaloo Électrique

By Kieran Doyle

Coming off the highs of the 2022 season, CF Montreal felt like they had some real momentum… then they let their best in league coach walk, sold their eight (maybe) best players, hired a maniac, and decided we’ll play 180 degrees different from our very successful previous tactical identity and now with mostly bad players. That went predictably badly, with Montreal undergoing a humongous -30 xGD swing from +18 to -12, as they just missed the playoffs in a weak Eastern conference. Also at some point they had to cut one of their few good players for fighting a guy in a men's league game. Truthfully, the less said about 2023 the better. 

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Season Previews: DC United, Minnesota, NYCFC

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Lesesne in the Membrane

By Nate Gilman

DC United wasn’t terrible in 2023, finishing 12th in the Eastern Conference though racking up 40 points and a +5.99 expected goals difference pre American Soccer Analysis data. But it was an uninspiring season nonetheless and a major offseason overhaul followed. So the Black and Red enter the 2024 season with what looks to be real change for the first time in a long time. Wayne Rooney is out. Same, too, with Dave Kasper. Ally Mackay (and Caleb Shreve!) are in. So is Troy Lesesne. 

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Season Previews: Austin, LA Galaxy, Chicago

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A Sheep in Wolff’s Clothing

By Tony ElHabr

2023 Disasterclass

Austin FC's 2023 season was a stark departure from their 2022 success, marred by injury woes and underperforming signings from the departed and controversial Claudio Reyna. The defensive line sorely missed Ruben Gabrielsen as the injury bug hit the backline, forcing Alex Ring into an impromptu center back role for a majority of the season. The attacking front struggled as well, with Emiliano Rigoni and Gyasi Zardes often having underwhelming performances. On the brighter side of things, Jon Gallagher’s early season nose for the net earned him an All-Star selection, and Brad Stuver continued to be a shot-stopping savant. 

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Season Previews: Miami, Toronto, Colorado

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Messi Messi Top 10 Moments Messi SEO Messi Schedule Messi Tickets Messi

By Sean Steffen

Miami. City of … something. I don’t know, beaches, presumably. It's’ a town that loves sports, when LeBron is on the team, or the Heat are inexplicably in the finals. But last year, Miami sports fans had something new to excite them, and the city became known worldwide for something else: its proximity to Fort Lauderdale.

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Who are the best penalty takers in the 2023 MLS playoffs?

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Once again, it’s time for the Major League Soccer playoffs and penalty shootout season. Changes in the playoff format to a best of three-game first round where tie games after regulation go straight to a shootout mean that a player’s penalty taking skill may be more important than ever. 

To quantitatively determine the best penalty takers in the 2023 playoffs, I again turn to empirical Bayes estimation. If you want the full explanation of how this works, go read my 2021 article on this topic, or, better yet, Tuan Nguyen Doan’s work that I based this work on. In short, I gathered penalty kick information via FBRef for 863 players that have attempted more than 4 penalties in their club careers (international matches are excluded here). This was used to calculate what is known as the prior distribution - basically what you would expect a normal player’s penalty taking ability to be if you know nothing about them. As a player takes penalties, the number and conversion rate give you more information about each player that updates your prior distribution to a posterior distribution. The more penalties that a player attempts gives more confidence in our ability to determine how good they actually are at taking penalties.

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Net Goals Added: Combining Complementary Possession Value Metrics

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Net Goals Added: Combining Complementary Possession Value Metrics

By Mike Imburgio

It’s been about three years since goals added (g+) was first introduced with the aim of measuring how much value a player adds to their team through on-ball actions. Since then, the g+ model has been refined and improved, and lots has been learned.

In fact, the creation of g+ has since spawned two related metrics, g- and g+ boost, which extended the g+ framework to answer questions that g+ itself doesn’t. Because these three metrics were designed to complement each other, bringing them together to form a total player value should provide a holistic system that accounts not just for what a player does on the ball, but what happens after they pass the ball and what happens when their opponent has the ball.

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Thomas Bayes? Meet Djordje Petrovic

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Thomas Bayes? Meet Djordje Petrovic

MLS is no stranger to star goalkeepers turning the fortune of a team, carrying a bedraggled defense to respectability off the virtue of their shot stopping. From Tony Meola and Joe Cannon to Nick Rimando and Stefan Frei, that is MLS heritage. In recent years, the goalkeeping landscape has been dominated by two men in New England, first Matt “xGod” Turner and then a rather large Serbian fellow named Djordje Petrovic. Both shattered the limits of what we thought possible in terms of goalkeeping statistics. 

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The Replication Project: Measuring Shooting Overperformance

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The Replication Project: Measuring Shooting Overperformance

Before Laurie Shaw was working for the esteemed City Football Group, he was gifting us with tidbits of knowledge in blog posts. One such piece of writing was “Exceeding Expected Goals”, a dive into the age-old question of finishing skill in soccer.

While expected goals (xG) tell us about the quality of the shots—accounting for the context of a shot—they’re agnostic to player identity, so we need more info to tease out individual shooting ability. Shaw points out that one way to evaluate finishing “overperformance” is to divide a player’s count of goals (G) by their xG. A ratio of 1 indicates that a player is scoring as many goals as expected; a ratio greater than 1 indicates overperformance; and a ratio less than 1 indicates underperformance.

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